An Investigation of Multimodal Display for Continuous Glucose Monitoring

Abstract

Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM) have helped those struggling with Type 1 Diabetes improve their glycemic control without increasing episodes of hypoglycemia (Gandhi et. al., 2011). However, current implementations of CGMs have a low rate of adoption, as well as a high rate of reduction or discontinuation of use. One of the primary reasons attributed to the discontinued use of CGM is the occurrence of Alarm fatigue amongst users of the device. This thesis investigates the issue of alarm fatigue in Continuous Glucose Monitors in order to provide guidelines for the implementation of a more effective notification system. The first part of the thesis describes a qualitative study of users of Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) devices, focusing on the ways in which the device alarms are used to display glucose status. The findings of this section suggest that good design of wearable multi-modal display for CGM should balance the social and cognitive implications of display modalities, the tactile display should be used to communicate a larger bandwidth of information, and that CGMs should allow display modes and thresholds to be customized the individual user. The second part of the thesis describes an investigation into the efficacy of a tactile display for CGM, focusing on the accuracy and response time of participants. Two tactile displays were developed in order to compare current implementations of tactile display in wrist-worn wearable technology (single-tactor) with a multi-tactor displays. Results of this section indicate that the bandwidth of tactile display can be increased: 8 CGM messages were communicated to participants with an average of 73.62% accuracy. The multi-tactor display was found to be significantly more accurate than the single-tactor display with a p-value of 0.03667.