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Diabetes mellitus is a chronic condition characterized by
elevated blood glucose levels. The reason for these elevated
blood glucose levels is due to one’s insulin, a hormone
produced by the pancreas to filter sugar from your blood, not
functioning properly. It is a disorder that currently affects
over 30 million Americans. The vast majority of people with
diabetes (~90%) have Type II diabetes. Those with Type II
have grown resistant to their body’s insulin over a long
period of time (usually decades) and have a reduced capacity
for blood sugar regulation. Causes of type 2 diabetes are
often attributed to having a family history of diabetes, as
well as a poor diet and exercise routine. Because of their
high blood sugar levels, people with type 2 diabetes suffer
from frequent hunger, increased thirst, fatigue, and blurred
vision. Since diabetes is considered to be an irreversible
condition, people with type 2 diabetes are left only to
manage their condition for the remainder of their lives
through various recommended strategies, including monitoring
of blood sugar, carbohydrate intake, and medication use.
However, type 2 diabetes prevention programs can successfully
lower diabetes incidence.
One such program is the lifestyle arm of the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP). This was designed to prevent future cases of diabetes by finding high-risk patients and offering moderate lifestyle and diet changes. These high-risk patients are usually overweight and have intermediate elevated blood sugar levels that do not yet meet the criteria for type 2 diabetes. This state describes the condition of prediabetes, and the US Department of Health and Human Services estimates that a third of US adults meet the criteria for prediabetes as of 2015. The DPP’s goal is to reduce the patient’s body weight by 7% and, in doing so, the DPP is successful in delaying and even preventing a future diabetes diagnoses. On average, a patient’s risk of diabetes onset is reduced by 58%, as well as 45% of program participants self-identified as an ethnic or racial minority.
A problem these prevention programs are facing is the completion rates among their participants. Native Americans have the highest withdrawal rate from the DPP with approximately one-third prematurely dropping out of the 16-session program. Reasons for not completing the program or what can lead to someone dropping out are complex and hard to grasp. The current technique for finding out these reasons is through Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). In EMA, the methodology is to frequently ask the participants to record what they are feeling in the moment as a means for researchers to find disparities. Since it is currently implemented through phone-surveys conducted by the researchers, EMA is expensive, time consuming, and intrusive for research participants. In order to improve retention, SugarCoded is deploying a mobile app and web portal to aid with EMA research. This will allow surveys to be completed through participant’s mobile phones and for researchers to prepare and deploy surveys to these participants via the web portal. By aiding researchers with our product, we can help increase the effectiveness of EMA research and in turn, help increase retention rates in diabetes prevention programs.
