Innovations in Diabetes Education

Gamifying Diabetes is lead by HealthDesignBy.Us and GameStart, a local start-up in Ann Arbor that uses video games to teach technical and design concepts. The organizations connected when both Dr. Lee (view slides) and GameStart (view video) were speakers at TEDxDetroit 2014, and discovered a mutual interest in participatory design for education. They decided to explore combining GameStart's curricular approach of teaching kids to design their own games with the mission of HealthDesignBy.Us, to empower patients and caregivers to be experts and makers of their own health, to prototype and create an innovative new form of diabetes education. 

They have conducted a number of workshops for teens with diabetes hosted at Mott Hospital, the JDRF Type 1 Conference, and the We #MakeHealthFest. The team has now secured a Patient Education Award from the University of Michigan Health System, and is working with the Mott Pediatric Diabetes Team to develop a type 1 diabetes educational curriculum delivered to children through a gaming platform. For updates about this project please sign up for our mailing list. 

Check out this Storify about the collaboration and MedCity News article, Participatory Design Initiative Uses Gaming Collaboration to Cultivate Young Patient Experts! 

Back to projects