Motivational app for patients with Diabetes

Chronic diseases like Diabetes type 2 stay with patients all their lives. With time, the motivation to follow the prescribed diet and medication fades away. I am working towards designing a system where the caregiving network becomes the main source of motivation for the patient so that they better adhere to the prescribed diet and medication. 

“I hate that diabetes restricts my life and people don’t really understand it. They just comment” - Bora Jiao

Konnect is a mobile app that offers challenges where the patients can participate in with people in their caregiving network. Success or failure of their individual goals combined together will decide the end result of the challenge. Winning the challenge makes the team win rewards. 

Konnect can help - 

- Promote healthy conversations within the family around health.
- Provide support to the family member suffering from the chronic disease by helping caregivers be a part of their journey. 
- Gamification - more focus, playing for the team. 
- Makes the patient feel comfortable with sharing. 
- Keeps the patient motivated. 
- Rewards provide extra motivation to the patient and its network.  

I interviewed people with diabetes to understand their daily challenges. Some key insights from the interviews were that support through family, friends or support groups helps patients emotionally stay motivated. Patients are well aware of the ways in which they can control diabetes, they know the consequences, have all the highly advanced devices and some families even share articles on healthy lifestyle frequently with each other but even after all this, patients find it difficult to implement it in their lives. 

From all the insights generated, I came to a conclusion that involvement of families or caregivers is a strong motivating factor in the lives of these patients. The motive of the caregivers is to see the patient healthy, engaging them more in the journey of the patient can help the patient feel supported. 

Before conducting the user research, I wanted to design a betting competition game where missing the goals would result in loss of money. But after the research, I realized that the patients already feel burdened by the extra efforts they put into their disease and loss of money can result in patient's quitting the app. The current game is modified to be more positive by designing it to help patient's family win rewards in the form of coupons as an accomplishment and motivation.

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