Who Is Downloading the Freeware AIDA v4.3 Interactive Educational Diabetes Simulator? An Audit of 2,437 Downloads

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to report an audit of 2,437 downloads of the AIDA interactive educational diabetes simulator. AIDA is a diabetes computer program that permits the interactive simulation of plasma insulin and blood glucose profiles for educational, demonstration, and self-learning purposes. It has been made freely available, without charge, on the Internet as a noncommercial contribution to continuing diabetes education. Since its launch in 1996 over 200,000 visits have been logged at the AIDA Website-www.2aida.org-and over 37,000 copies of the AIDA program have been downloaded free-of-charge. This report documents an audit of downloaders of the software, with the intended goals of the study being to demonstrate the use of the Internet for auditing and surveying diabetes software users and to confirm the proportion of patients with diabetes and their relatives who are actually making use of the AIDA v4.3 program. The Internet-based survey methodology was confirmed to be robust and reliable. Over a 7 1 / 2 -month period (from mid-July 2000 to early March 2001) 2,437 responses were received. During the corresponding period 4,100 actual downloads of the software were independently logged via the same route at the AIDA Website-giving a response rate to this audit of 59.4%. Responses were received from participants in 61 countries-although over half of these (n 5 1,533; 62.9%) originated from the United States and United Kingdom. Of these responses 1,361 (55.8%) were received from patients with diabetes and 303 (12.4%) from relatives of patients, with fewer responses from doctors, diabetes educators, students, nurses, pharmacists, and other end users. This study has confirmed the feasibility of using the Internet to survey, at no real cost, a large number of medical software downloaders/users. In addition, it has yielded up-to-date and interesting data about who are the main downloaders of the AIDA program. 467

Why Are People Downloading the Freeware AIDA Diabetes Computing Software Program: A Pilot Study

“…Initially five questions were asked; 9 however, since the release of a newer version of the AIDA program, six questions have been used. 20 The basic questions have been documented previously elsewhere in this journal. 20 In addition to identifying the sort of end users that were downloading the software, a further purpose of the previous surveys 9,20 has been to identify what computer hardware and operating systems people are using-which has facilitated distribution via the Internet of new freeware releases of the AIDA program.…”

“…Therefore by keeping the survey anonymous it was expected that the response rate could be increased, with the expectation being that this would reduce the likelihood of people being inhibited about actually answering the questions. 20 For the current survey-to identify people's expectations when they download the AIDA software (before they had a chance to try the program)-downloaders who had answered the initial six questions posed on the www. 2aida.org/download Web page were subsequently asked a further question.…”

“…It was felt best, for the current study, to ask the main survey question of people who had already volunteered to answer the previous six questions 20 in order to select out site visitors who would be less likely to provide meaningful responses. Connected with this, it was felt that people who were not willing or able to complete the initial survey-with simple pulldown menu questions/answers-would be unlikely to provide meaningful free-text responses.…”

“…Furthermore we do have various other methods of assessing use of the simulator-and all these different indicators need to be considered together to compile an overall perspective of usage. For instance, numbers of AIDA program downloads and numbers of AIDA online Webbased diabetes simulations at www.2aida.org/ online 16,27 -as documented elsewhere 20 -provide an indication of ongoing interest and usage.…”

“…These are yielding useful information about what sort of people are downloading and using the software. 9,20 For the current study we had three main aims. These were: (1) to demonstrate the ongoing use of the World Wide Web for surveying diabetes software users by obtaining their free-text comments; (2) to identify what sort of things people were planning to do with the AIDA software simulator; and (3) to more generally gain some insight into why people are turning to the Internet for healthcare-related information.…”