In cooperation with The Health Agency, I designed and developed a web and mobile based support for children with diabetes. This year long project involved extensive research with children, parents and healthcare providers. Besides from a design research perspective, the problem was approached from a psychological point of view (see picture 2 above). Finally, 20 handsets have been provided for a proof of concept to families coping with diabetes. The project was sponsored and supported by Rabomobiel, Achmea ice and the Diabeter foundation.

SweetMotion focusses on supporting treatment adherence by planning and monitoring diabetes tasks and events. Through reminders and feedback children can independently cope with their diabetes, but keeping parents involved by allowing them to remotely monitor the child’s actions through a personal website.

SweetMotion consists of an application on the mobile phone of the child and a personalized website that can be accessed by both the child as parents. The main feature of the personalized website is the week planner. With this planner, parents and/or children can schedule diabetes-related events like measuring glucose, insulin injections, having a snack or meal, or doing exercise. For some children such a schedule has been pre-defined in their diabetes-regime; for instance, children that rely on an insulin pump need to eat a snack or meal in time, because the insulin pump is set to administer a dose of insulin at a given time.

If a parents makes adjustments to the planning, the planning on the handset is updated subsequently. On the website, parents can see the passed events presented by the icon with the related values.

Eventually, SweetMotion presents a comprehensive overview of glucose measurements related to the context in which they occured. This allows children, parents and occasionally the pediatrician to reflect on, and optimize the treatment regime.