Designing a dashboard from the analysis of self-made diaries for type 1 diabetes

This work reports on the design and prototypical deployment of a personal health record system to support patients and their families in the everyday management and sharing of diabetes information with a pediatric department. Aim: to provide families and healthcare providers with an electronic alternative to the paper logbook commonly in use. Materials and method: a preliminary analysis of the forms of personal health management was conducted with 13 families. Results: the analysis revealed that the vast majority of families abandoned the paper logbook provided by the hospital after some months and they replaced it with a self-made logbook designed around their specific needs, mainly because of a very limited space for personal observation (food, physical activity, flu, period, strategies to deal with birthday parties). Moreover, not only families designed their own booklet, they also modified them over time to adapt to their children?s changing needs. This behaviour requires doctors to confront with a non-standard logbooks for each patient. The smartphone application TreC Diabetes was designed to allow families to have a flexible record keeping track of many different parameters; at the same time it allows healthcare personnel to see graphics and charts regarding patient data. Moreover, a rule-based alert system was designed to warn the department about some specific conditions