DialBetics With a Multimedia Food Recording Tool, FoodLog

Abstract

Ongoing diabetes self-management education of patients focused on behavioral and lifestyle modification is an essential element of diabetes care. 1 Systems based on information and communication technology (ICT) that support such selfmanagement are promising tools to help patients better cope with their diabetes. 2 An ICT platform helps patients improve lifestyle-related behavior, improving their health status. 3 And these tools should help limit medical costs somewhat by providing cost-effective support and intervention: if patients can improve diabetes self-management without undue time and attention from health care providers, the net effect should be containment of costs. 4 Many health applications based on mobile phones have been developed and distributed worldwide. Previous studies have reported positive effects of these applications in providing ongoing support for diabetes self-management. 5 However, most applications offer patients limited opportunity for feedback about satisfaction and usability; few applications are patient-oriented 3 in that they fail to consider whether patients will find it easy or hard to use the application. Indeed, incorporation of technical advances into such applications can be challenging because developing integration between clinical Abstract Background: Diabetes self-management education is an essential element of diabetes care. Systems based on information and communication technology (ICT) for supporting lifestyle modification and self-management of diabetes are promising tools for helping patients better cope with diabetes. An earlier study had determined that diet improved and HbA1c declined for the patients who had used DialBetics during a 3-month randomized clinical trial. The objective of the current study was to test a more patient-friendly version of DialBetics, whose development was based on the original participants' feedback about the previous version of DialBetics. Method: DialBetics comprises 4 modules: data transmission, evaluation, exercise input, and food recording and dietary evaluation. Food recording uses a multimedia food record, FoodLog. A 1-week pilot study was designed to determine if usability and compliance improved over the previous version, especially with the new meal-input function. Results: In the earlier 3-month, diet-evaluation study, HbA1c had declined a significant 0.4% among those who used DialBetics compared with the control group. In the current 1-week study, input of meal photos was higher than with the previous version (84.8 ± 13.2% vs 77.1% ± 35.1% in the first 2 weeks of the 3-month trial). Interviews after the 1-week study showed that 4 of the 5 participants thought the meal-input function improved; the fifth found input easier, but did not consider the result an improvement. Conclusions: DialBetics with FoodLog was shown to be an effective and convenient tool, its new meal-photo input function helping provide patients with real-time support for diet modification.

Effect of ecological momentary assessment, goal-setting and personalized phone-calls on adherence to interval walking training using the InterWalk application among patients with type 2 diabetes—A pilot randomized controlled trial

“…And finally, Morton et al found that a combination of tailored electronic messages, goal-setting and personalized feedback was more effective in enhancing PA, than text-messages alone in a population of people at high risk of T2D [47]. These findings are in agreement with previous findings [48–51]. Even though EMA’s in our trial did not have an in-built learning algorithm, patients were adherent to IWT.…”

“…Interventions aimed at creating change PA behavior through such means, and EMA’s, have shown positive effects in relation to health-related behavior changes including PA [54–56]. This holds true both when the intervention is used as a co-intervention to PA [28,48] and as a self-management tool [49,50]. The observed response rates to text-messages in our trial were however, comparable to those found in similar studies using a theoretical framework when designing usability and acceptable electronic messages in health care [26,57–61].…”

Smartphones and Apps to Control Glycosylated Hemoglobin (HbA1c) Level in Diabetes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…One way to reach a greater number of patients is to make greater use of technological resources, but some patients have highlighted certain difficulties encountered, for example, in recording the necessary health data into a smartphone app. Such problems can lead to the patient abandoning the app and failing to perform the activities proposed [41].…”

Mobile-Based Interventions for Dietary Behavior Change and Health Outcomes: Scoping Review

“…As described earlier, the literature on dietary behavior changes through mobile interventions has yet to be comprehensively reviewed, thus motivating our scoping review. Furthermore, although 20 of the studies in our review [11-13,19-21, 23,24,28,30-37,40,42,49] conducted RCTs, they differed in research questions and objectives, and had diverse outcome variables. Thus, the effectiveness of different interventions in these studies becomes incomparable through a systematic review.…”

“…We found only a few studies assessing both dietary behavior changes and health outcomes [13,25,26,31,32]. However, other researchers have directly studied the effects of mobile-based interventions on health outcomes (eg, weight loss) [11,12,14,33-42].…”