Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Friends Helping Friends Manage Diabetes

Let's call it GlucoPALS

A while back I had a conversation with a young man about managing his own diabetes, how that works with his mother(and sometimes doesn't work), and what would happen if teens were given more independence by working with another teen with diabetes. Andrew wrote up that concept and told me that the "Buddy Protocol" (my description) wasn't going to fly. I think he suggested something about pals and thus the concept of GlucoPALS was put to paper.

It really is a powerful concept documented all over the place; pen pals, fitness partners, diet partners, business partners... Why not diabetes pals? So, we have a study getting underway designed to better understand what happens when a couple of teens use real-time communication to help each other manage through the day. If you have an interest in contributing to the final study design or participating, please send me an email. I expect this first go will become quite large throughout the US and Canada followed by a more formal study. Look for frequent posts here on the experiment. I suspect GlucoPALS will start its own blog, too.

A hint at the "Virtual-Loop" (my original post): it encompasses the closed-loop but is not limited to it.