The Task:

Helping students with Type 1 Diabetes adjust to college


The Problem:
Sending a child off to college is an emotional experience for many parents, but when your child has diabetes, it’s bound to be even more overwhelming.
There is a whole new world of stress levels and eating habits on campus, and when it comes to balanced food, college life can be incredibly tough on diabetes management.
While tracking what you eat is one of the most important parts of diabetes management, young adults often struggle to self-manage their diabetes during the transition from childhood to adulthood.
This transition, especially for students who leave home and go to college, may be complicated by reliance on fast food, busy schedules, late-night studying, lack of sleep and alcohol use.
Design Process:
The design process includeded the following steps:
  • Empathizing and learning more about students with diabetes, their struggles, their needs and wants and the environment in which they will operate.
  • Identifying and framing the students problems.
  • Conducting in-depth user research:
    Diabetes data and statistics, students interviews, parents interviews, surveys and questionnaires, competitive audit, Diabetes Organizations & Associations analysis.
  • Ideating possible solutions: Brainstorming sessions with stakeholders: PMs, engineers, ux researchers, designers.
  • Designing & Prototyping.
  • Usability testing & Validation.
  • Iteration.
Findings:
Students with diabetes face a wide range of problems within the academic buildings, particularly navigating diabetes in the dining halls and cafeterias:
  • It's often impossible to access nutritional information and serving sizes, making it hard to count carbs.
  • There is a limited variety of healthy meals options.
  • There is limited access to dining halls during late hours, so students rely on fast food and vending machines.
  • There is a lack of access to cooking facilities.
The Solution:
The best way to manage diabetes is to have a proper nutritious diet and keep a regular check on sugar levels.
Meal planning is the best strategy for maintaining a healthy blood glucose level.
Knowing how many carbohydrates (carbs) you're eating and drinking helps the students manage their blood glucose levels by matching their insulin dose to the amount of carbs in their meals. When students walk into a dining hall and look at all the buffet-style options, it can be very tempting to pile the plate high with a few options of comfort food.
But when they are armed with a meal plan before they enter the dining hall, it is easy to keep track of how many carbs they can consume per meal in order to avoid blood sugar swings.
Many dining halls publish their weekly menus in advance so if the student is too busy with school work, parents can help in the meal planning process and build for them healthy balanced meals along with all the nutrition information.
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