Design Concepts for Digital Diabetes Practice
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: IntroductionThe paper examines digital to support daily living with the chronic illness of diabetes. The ambition of the study is rooted in Papanek's (1984) definition of responsibility as engagement with problems. This includes a broad perspective on human ecology. Papanek illustrated this with a triangle (Figure 1), which depicted designers as working only in the top segment, thus exhibiting a lack of social engagement in design and being responsible for bad due to not getting involved (Papanek, 1984, p. 56). Designing for the real world calls for engaging with peoples' real problems, that is, the lower part of Figure 1. Recent literature on and medicine calls attention to this need to engage with people's real problems and practices in contrast to a focus solely on a given medical condition. One example of this is Pullin's (2009) analysis of a series of products designed to support people with disabilities. Pullin shows how can contribute to broadening the traditional medical engineering perspective on illness and the body by engaging with people's everyday lives and including qualities related to everyday practice, emotions, identity, etc. in the product design. Even in hospital settings, there are calls for thinking beyond the cure and expanding the solution space of medical technology to include patients' emotional well-being (Mullaney, Pettersen, Nyholm, & Stolterman, 2012). This paper supports these calls for grounded in engagement with peoples' everyday practices. It presents results from a long-term participatory research project in which the objective was to digital support for everyday living with diabetes in co-operation with 17 families affected by the illness.[Figure omitted, see PDF]Figure 1. Papanek's (1984) visualisation of designer's responsibility to focus on problems of everyday life.Diabetes is a serious chronic illness, especially type 1 diabetes, which requires strict control of the blood glucose level. This is obtained by balancing a triangle of food, exercise and insulin (Figure 2).[Figure omitted, see PDF]Figure 2. The clinical model of diabetes management.Diabetics must measure their blood glucose level several times a day and calculate carbohydrate intake, insulin dosage and physical activity. These activities are termed self-management. If the diabetic fails to self-manage (forgets to monitor, miscalculates, is ill from influenza, etc.) the consequences can be severe. Short-term imbalances in the triangle of diabetes (Figure 2) are called hypoglycaemic episodes. They cause various physical and psychic symptoms and may lead to unconsciousness. Manifest hyperglycaemia can lead to an internal poisoning-like condition known as a diabetic coma, which can lead to death. Chronic moderate hyperglycaemia implies an increased risk for early and severe late-stage diabetes complications.Digital technology designed to support diabetics is primarily anchored in the clinical perspective of individual self-management (Figure 2), just as most self-management programs deal only with medical management (Lorig & Holman, 2003, pp. 2-3). Typical self-management technologies for diabetes are software applications into which diabetics enter their blood glucose measurements, insulin doses and food intake, monitor changes in glucose level and learn from this (Boisen, Bygholm, Cavan, & Hejlesen, 2003). This primary focus on illness and the body, in contrast to engagement with people and practices, can be interpreted as either underestimating the importance of everyday practices in the management of chronic illness or representing the difficulty of designing for this expanded solution space.The research question this paper addresses is how to expand digital for diabetes to encompass attention to daily life with a chronic illness. This question has guided research on everyday life activities related to diabetes and the exploration of digital designs for these activities. …
Author: Anne Marie Kanstrup
Institution: Aalborg University
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Aalborg Universitet
OpenAlex ID: W1546894589