The Virtual Diabetician: A Prototype for a Virtual Avatar for Diabetes Treatment Using Persuasion Through Storytelling

Diabetes affects a large portion of the population and the current treatments only provide methods to manage the condition. Newer treatments do exist but the means to access such information is usually limited. This research proposes a solution by developing a prototype of a virtual avatar application providing diabetes treatment information to type 2 patients using persuasive techniques such as storytelling. Different instruments are used to evaluate the application usability, its persuasive power and the improvement of the diabetes condition. The results show that the application has good usability based on the system usability scale and lead to an improvement of the diabetes condition management. However, we acknowledge that certain technical barriers prevented the virtual diabetician to be more effective. The results indicate that the Virtual Diabetician does possess a set of components that can efficiently provide diabetes information to patients using an innovative medium of transmitting the information