Development and evaluation of a healthy coping voice interface application using the Google home for elderly patients with type 2 diabetes

Patient self-management of diabetes is crucial to reducing its chronic progression and serious future health complications. Due to the physical and emotional complexities of diabetes, adherence to self-care activities can quickly decline because of disheartening progress. While there exists technology that caters to diabetic self-management, the current state of the art mostly assists patients through mobile applications. For the elderly, these mobile apps are marginally effective and even frustrating to use. Therefore, this project proposes Healthy Coping with Diabetes, a Google Home assistant application that acts as an innovative intervention strategy to assist elderly patients with self-management of type 2 diabetes. This application framework combines the voice interface of Google Home for hosting the conversational agent and a web interface for data visualization in order to reduce the burden of monitoring diabetic consequences for the user. We perform a feature-based comparison of our application against currently available mobile apps to determine the relative fulfillment of official American Association of Diabetes Educators self-management components. Finally, we calculate standard usability metrics to receive feedback and further improve the application capabilities.