CDH Seniors Designing Mobile Phone App for Diabetes Monitoring

Reprinted from Traditions, Spring 2017-2018 - By Jackson Sweeney'17
July 25, 2017

As seniors, Jacob Hearst'17, John Modl'17and Louie Shearon'17 saw a very specific need for younger people with diabetes and their medical team to have a better tool to help them monitor blood sugar levels -which is critical for the management of this chronic disease.

“The app is supposed to make testing your blood sugar fun for people with Type 1 diabetes,” explains Louis Shearon.

He knows first hand the challenge diabetes monitoring presents because he was diagnosed with diabetes in 9th grade. He is not alone. Three Million Americans face the challenges of monitoring blood sugar due to their Type 1 diabetes.

The design of the app is simple. A patient inputs his or her blood sugar levels throughout the day. Each entry earns tokens. The tokens can unlock different things in the app such as different sounds or animations.

Motivation is high because the tracking becomes a ‘game’ with immediate feedback and reinforcement. As the blood sugar testing continues, the user can earn a ‘streak,’ a method that has been popular with many teenagers on other social media platforms such as Snapchat.

App creators, Hearst, Modl and Shearon hope that this system will help draw teens back to the app day after day, ensuring a better, more consistent commitment to monitoring their health.

Although the app continues to grow in scale, it started from humble beginnings. During his 9th grade year, Shearon was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes but did little about it. In reference to his diagnosis, Shearon says, “I pretended like I hadn’t been (diagnosed).”

The idea for the app started when he was working with Children’s Hospital for support and assistance in dealing with his diabetes. He noticed that there were opportunities to improve on the process of how the doctors were accessing patient data.

Children’s Hospital, and their group of doctors and educators, currently use a diabetes tracking app called My Sugar. The problem with this app is that health professionals have to use their personal phones to log in to individual patient accounts to view data.

Working with Shearon, the students set a goal to alleviate this issue and began working on an app to allow doctors and educators an easier way of viewing patient data.

Hearst noted they got the serious attention of some of the physicians when they promised to nd a way to give doctors and the medical staff easier access to patients’ data.

“Our process has been kind of a rollercoaster over the last couple of years,” says Modl about getting to where they are now.

Before they began developing their current app, the team had been working with Metro Transit on a project that was ultimately scrapped. The three students jumped on the idea for a diabetes- testing app based on Shearon’s experiences from being a patient
at Children’s Hospital.

From there, they hit the ground running and began to work on different aspects of the app. At times, however, they weren’t exactly sure what they were doing, as they were still only high schoolers and had a lot to learn about app development.

“I kind of just jumped in without planning what I wanted it to look like,” Hearst says about how he approached the design of the app. However, the application is evolving into a user-ready tool.

The team had to rely heavily on the internet to help them develop the app. There are entire sites dedicated to teaching new programmers the basics of apps and coding, which helped them immensely in their process.

Modl says, “It is becoming increasingly more and more important to learn how to use a technology to solve problems.”

Although they have learned many new things about coding and programming, the team has also learned how to set goals and make sure they are moving in the right direction.

The three of them meet weekly to discuss next steps for the app and what needs to be accomplished by the next meeting. This goal-focused style is called agile software development and has helped their process become more streamlined.

“It’s like CASA (Connecting Adults and Students to Achieve, a program to build connections and community at CDH), but for programming,” says Shearon.

They now have a name for the app: Droplet, which is a reference to the drop of blood needed when testing blood sugars.

As the app is nearly in beta – or the quality testing phase – they are having more serious conversations with Children’s Hospital. They plan to begin a program working with 20 to 50 patients to see if the app helps to significantly improve the number of times patients check their blood sugar.

“It will allow better communication between the hospital, patient, and the doctor,” Modl explained.

Doctors will be able to see their patients’ data and will
be able to evaluate it in real time, instead of just at check-ups. Along with that, the app will be much more customizable for both the doctor and patients and will allow them to see trends over time.

Modl says that they see this as a universal app for Type 1 diabetics, and hope that it will continue to grow.

The beauty of Droplet is that it can evolve with the needs of both educators and patients. If certain features are needed, the three plan to work closely to meet these needs at no cost to the patient.

With college in the near future, all of them plan on continuing the business and developing new app technology. Their long term goals include being able to hire more programmers and developers to make the work go faster. The three recent graduates are heading to different colleges, but remain committed to the development of this app.
Louie Shearon will be attending St. Norbert’s in Green
Bay, Wisconsin. John Modl is headed to the University
of Minnesota – Twin Cities and Jacob Hearst will attend University of Wisconsin – Stout.

They hope that they work they’ve done with Children’s Hospital will propel them into the future.

“This app development project has a lot of meaning for us,” reflected Hearst. “Knowing a person who faces the challenges of diabetes gave us the reason to work so hard.”

“Our first goal is to make Droplet work for the patient, but also for the doctor,” said Modl.

This article and more are featured in the Spring 2017-2018 issue of the CDH magazine, Traditions.