Digital knowledge ecosystem for empowering users to self-manage diabetes through context specific actionable information

Current high numbers of diabetes patients worldwide and the associated cost indicates current approaches to managing this chronic disease is not effective. The literature indicates the need to provide context specific actionable information to these patients to better manage diabetes which is not happening at present. Making use of wide spread digital connectivity now available due to rapid growth of mobile phone usage and concept of Digital Knowledge Ecosystem to enhance flow of information within a domain we applied scenario based design approach to develop a new scenario for better manage diabetes. The transformed scenario captures the current life situation such as exercise, food and emotional habit of the patient on a day to day basis using mobile application and sensor devices. This collected information is aggregated and provided to the care provider, allowing the care provider to understand which advice has been successfully followed and which of the advices need to be modified to suit the needs of the patient. The care provider can set up modified advice as protocols through the system. The protocols are then used by the system based on the context to generate the set of daily actions that the patient has to perform. We also developed the initial set of user interfaces to support the transformed scenario. Thus we have shown that conceptually now it is possible to have a new scenario to better manage diabetes overcoming deficiencies reported in literature of the current scenario.