Development of a health management support system for patients with diabetes mellitus at home

Abstract

Recently, a patient with diabetes mellitus (DM) type 2 has been increasing in Japan. The patient should be managed not only by a specialist but also by himself focusing his attention on the improvement of his lifestyle at home. In the present study, we tried to develop a health management support system by which a diabetic patient in early stage can easily enter his daily life information, i.e. the biological information such as the data of blood sugar levels and blood pressure levels etc., the information of exercise and diet and send the information to the medical institution with a personal digital assistant (PDA). Afterwards, the patient can receive health instruction information by the physician in charge for self-care at his home with a PDA. The daily life information sent from the patient is stored in a server installed at the medical institution and analyzed. The physician can obtain the results of analysis by using a PC and send the instruction information necessary for patient management to the patient at home by using e-mail after diagnosing the patient's condition by the system. To evaluate usability of the developed patient information input system with a PDA, an experiment was conducted by corporation of 20 volunteers who were possible self management and whose age's range from 20s to 60s by questionnaire survey. As a result, almost examinees answered that lifestyle information could be easily entered by the sense like a mobile-phone and lots of positive opinions were obtained.