Development of an educational tool for people with type 1 diabetes based on a physiological simulation model

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a chronic autoimmune disease in which patients are no longer able to keep blood glucose levels in the physiological range. In standard diabetic therapy, the patient can rely only on his abilities in estimating the therapeutic choices to be made. In this way, keeping blood glucose under control is not easy and represents a significant problem because the patient could remain in hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia for some time. In this context, digital educational tools have the potential of greatly support patients, healthcare providers, and families, by offering smart and intuitive approaches to tranfer clinical knowledge and, by product, improving the quality of care. The goal of this work was to create a tool based on a physiological model, easy to use, that could help the patient in the treatment of diabetes. To do this, a physiological model was implemented in Python and enclosed in a web server. Subsequently, through the Flutter framework, an application was created which using this model offers users a simple questionnaire with multiple common scenarios faced during the daily life by a diabetic patient. Then, to evaluate whether the tool was considered useful and easy to use, tests were carried out by means of zoom, in which the app was presented to the participants by sharing the screen and they had to complete the questionnaire. At the end of the trial, participants were asked to fill out a standard questionnaire to express their evaluation of the tool. Results showed that the developed application is intuitive and easy-to-use being of potential impact if deployed in current clinical practice. In the future, it will be possible to enrich the app with new features and equip it with additional and more complex scenarios, and will test it extensively on a larger number of people.