*Note: I signed an NDA for this project. I'm happy to share my main takeaways from working on this project, so please reach out or check out this website with more information.
Health technology for diabetes has come a long way since finger pricking every couple of hours. Dexcom has developed a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that makes tracking glucose levels so much easier for patients. However, this monitor poses other problems, such as
What’s an acceptable glucose reading for each individual?
This is the question that my group and I tackled throughout the 10 week internship.
We spent the first two weeks researching diabetes, scouring Facebook groups and other forums trying to learn everything we could about living with a CGM.
Our project lead organized interviews with people from the San Diego community living with CGMs and we learned that most patients would call Dexcom support to better understand if their CGM readings were acceptable.
We wanted to create a visualization for users to understand the acceptable range for their readings. Just because their CGM reading doesn't match their finger pricked reading, doesn't mean it's malfunctioning.
We incorporated our interview findings into one sleek solution:
a graph meant to visualize the user’s acceptable range of glucose readings.
We were able to conduct usability testing and make much needed changes based on user's existing mental models.
For example, the app already contains a graph of a user's acceptable glucose readings. We adapted our visualization to be different, so that user's don't confuse the two concepts.
Had the internship continued, the next step would be conducting a second round of usability testing.
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