Gamifying Diabetes — An Education Game Teaching People with Diabetes About Physical Activity

It has been found that sports is beneficial for individuals with type 1 diabetes. The risk for a severe hypoglycemia is increased by sports and needs to be managed carefully. Since health apps have a positive influence on the intended health behavior and clinical health outcomes, we decided to develop a health app for people with type 1 diabetes. We analyzed current apps for people with type 1 diabetes and found that there was no app focused on sports with type 1 diabetes. Thus, we decided to develop an app to teach people how to safely engage in sports with type 1 diabetes. For this, we worked together with the startup GLAICE which plans to bring a health app to the market that helps people with diabetes with their day to day lives and the management of their glucose levels. The startup’s focus topic is sports with diabetes. We developed a prototype of the app using the Design Thinking Method. Our solution is focused on the correct sports preparation and doing sports correctly with type 1 diabetes. We do this by using a game with multiple scenarios. Depending on how the user answers a series of questions, the player character can either have a successful sports day or can have a hypoglycemia during or after sports. Our targeted audience are people with type 1 diabetes between 18 and 35 years. We evaluated the prototype on people with diabetes, and 58 students visiting 12th grade tested the prototype for usability. For this, we used the System Usability Survey to receive the students’ feedback. The students graded the prototype’s usability with a B+. They also gave us further feedback by answering open questions. Our results show that this game is a successful first approach for teaching people with type 1 diabetes about sports with type 1 diabetes via app.