Influencing Behaviour to Improve Diabetes Self-Management: The Design and Evaluation of Mobile Health Applications

The global increase in the prevalence of diabetes along with the cost associated with complications is challenging traditional approaches to healthcare delivery. While the pervasiveness of mobile phones has resulted in a consumer-driven market for diabetes-focused mobile health applications (apps), the majority of these apps are not evidence-based or rigorously evaluated. The main objectives of this research were to design, develop and evaluate, a consumer-focused, behavioural app for the self-management of diabetes. Following a knowledge translation framework, existing evidence around behaviour change theory, diabetes self-management, and mHealth was reviewed, and informed the conceptualization of the app features. The app was developed following user-centered design principles, where iterative feedback was obtained from patients throughout the process. The resulting intervention, bant2, was a consumer-focused app for the self-management of type 2 diabetes, focused on the contextualization of blood glucose readings with personalized lifestyle behaviours. While a 12-month randomized controlled trial (RCT) was designed to evaluate the impact of bant2 on clinical outcomes, findings from recent studies led to reconsider both the intervention the evaluation approach. The bant RCT (n=96) andPh.D