Diabet-TECHS | TechPoint SOS Challenge | Telehealth Team 5

Overview

Currently, there are 3.9 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States- 58,607 of those are in the state of Indiana. With such a high infection rate, many Americans are taking precautions to mitigate the spread of the virus and protect themselves from getting infected. Needless to say, the COVID-19 pandemic has immensely changed peoples’ way of life. Furthermore, the CDC has identified many risk factors and conditions that have high comorbidity with COVID-19 - one of these is diabetes. Accounting for 12.5% of the general population, there are more than 738,000 children and adults with diabetes in Indiana. Diabetics are especially at risk because they often need to travel to healthcare providers in order to maintain regular blood sugar levels and receive additional care. We approached the TechPoint challenge by finding a way to reduce the number of visits to these caregiving facilities among diabetics, considering the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our team, Diabet-TECHS, has come up with a web-based application, T1DTutor, that will educate the diabetic population and increase the ability for remote caregiving. T1DTutor supplies the necessary educational resources, parent-child interfaces, and dietary assistance to empower diabetics to become more independent patients and to lead healthier lifestyles. By leading an independent lifestyle, diabetics are more equipped to regulate their blood sugar consistently and effectively while reducing their and their family members’ potential exposure to COVID-10.

Team Members

GoSquad Team:

Rachel Bellamy (Project Manager, Masters of Public Affairs in Policy Analysis & Social Entrepreneurship @ IU) As Project Manager, Rachel oversaw the project and presentation at-large, led daily meetings, delivered report-backs, and served as direct liaison with team members, coaches, and TechPoint staff. She also contributed to developing app, presentation, and script content, coached presenters, and worked on materials such as the Environmental Analysis. Rachel was intentional about leveraging her work experience in order to mentor her teammates. LinkedIn
William Eckrich (Business Development Lead, Junior Finance & Business Analytics @ IU) William created the business model PDF after initial research. He created the revenue model, and business development slides. Once the slide deck was completed, William led the formation of the template and formatted the deck to be presentation ready. He also was a presenter. LinkedIn
Akash Lokram (Product Developer, Junior Mechanical Engineering @ Purdue) Akash conducted an environmental analysis for the COVID-19 pandemic, diabetic epidemic, and app landscape at both a macro and micro level. Furthermore, he was a contributor in developing app features that would satisfy stakeholders. He also was a presenter for the final video presentation. LinkedIn

ProSquad Team:

Abigail Clayton (Software Developer, Junior Biomedical Engineering @ RHIT) Abigail implemented the content, features, and design of T1DTutor into a functional web browser application with her ProSquad team members. She also managed the recording and editing of the final video presentation. LinkedIn
Matthew Cummings (Lead Software Developer, Senior Informatics @ IU) Matt delegated tasks to ProSquad team members as the Team Lead. He also added BootStrap, content, features, and design to the T1DTutor web browser with the help of his ProSquad team members. He also created and developed the GitHub, and was a presenter for the final video presentation. LinkedIn
Vandana Prabhu (Content Researcher, Junior Computer Science @ Purdue) Vandana researched useful information and images relevant to the app content. LinkedIn

How did you decide on this customer segment, problem, and solution?

The main challenge for Telehealth teams was to identify a solution that minimizes the number of visits to a care-giver facility. Our team began the process of identifying a more specific problem and customer population by thinking of what individuals in our own lives are more at risk, and in need of, improved care. We ultimately decided that diabetic patients were a key population, and with their increased risk of complications during the COVID-19 pandemic, minimizing their trips to care facilities was of great importance.

With a customer population decided, and after conducting interviews with diabetics and researching current products on the app-market, we determined that a lack of information and guidance upon diagnosis was a problem yet to be solved. We reasoned that by better educating the diabetic population on what diabetes is and proper ways to manage it, trips to care facilities would decrease as diabetics would suffer less complications with improved independent care.

Our solution took the form of a web-based app with multiple pages detailing key aspects of diabetes management, as well as a feature for individuals to develop the habit of regularly monitoring their glucose and insulin levels.

How did your team build and iterate on the solution?

The first iteration of our solution was a low-fidelity prototype. This consisted of a powerpoint presentation with buttons/links to other slides of the presentation, which contained content for the different information pages of our app. We used this prototype as a proof-of-concept for our team members not involved with prototype creation, coaches, and our interviewees who agreed to provide feedback on our product.

The feedback we received from our team members, coaches, and interviewees were all key in improving our solution as we integrated from a low-fidelity to high-fidelity prototype. There was one piece of feedback that was brought up numerous times: Color. Up to this point, the ProSquad team was focused on fleshing out key features, so they put the overall color and design of the solution as a low priority. After receiving feedback though, ProSquad made sure to improve that major component in future renditions of our product.

Our current prototype is a functional web application. We used Repl.it as our coding workstation since it allows for real-time collaborative coding, and we also used Bootstrap to aid in the overall design of the website. Originally, we used Python Flask as our base coding language along with HTML, but ran into difficulties when improving the overall design of the website, so we switched to only HTML and CSS.

Key Metrics

Five interviews were conducted with diabetics, two of whom had been lifelong type 1 diabetics since childhood. We also interviewed spouses and caregivers.

Technical Details

Repl.it: Our main coding workstation, which allowed for collaborative coding of our final prototype and easy viewing of how our website was taking shape as we worked
a. Here is the Repl link of our workstation: Repl Workstation
Bootstrap: CSS framework, which aided in improving the overall design of our product
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: All these programming languages were the easiest for the development of the web app. We used these to build the page, add design and color, and add user interactions.
GitHub Pages: We used this to deploy the web-based app so that we would be able to show it without having people download the files. We decided on this as it is the easiest way to deploy while using github for file storage.
a. The Github repository is here: Github
b. The Github Pages/Web app is here: Web App
c. We recommend reading the ReadMe file on the repository before going through the web-app just in case you get lost inside the web app.

If you had another 5 weeks to work on this, what would you do next?

If we had five more weeks to work on this, we would strive to gain more comprehensive feedback on our app from our target customer base. This would include conducting focus groups of individuals who were type 1 and type 2 diabetics, and children and adults. We would also conduct focus groups incorporating secondary users, such as doctors, nurses, and caregivers. Another step we would take is implementing a survey system in which we would send the demo out to customers in these categories, and ask for feedback via survey at each weekly interval. Finally, we would conduct informational interviews with potential partners in both the private sector and state and local governments to get on their radar in preparation for rollout.

In terms of product development, we would like to implement more accurate and detailed information into our web-app. We’d also like to make a functioning monitoring system, where when the child states they did or did not check their glucose/insulin levels, the parent will be notified and a table will be filled with the date and time the child checked into the app. Currently, the information we have in our app is limited, and our monitoring system is hardcoded to show proof-of-concept. Besides improving current aspects of our web-app, we would also like to begin framing the adult diabetic patient interface, which a child will gain access to once they turn 18.

Further on in the future, product ideas of T1DTutor would contain the implementation of a more complex notification system. This would include parent actuated notifications to diabetic children. Furthermore, T1DTutor has plans to partner with private sector partners such as IU Health and Blue Apron, and nonprofits like the American Diabetics Association and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. These companies will be helpful partners in providing personalized medical servicing, diet help, and relevant diabetic information, respectively.