Personal discovery in diabetes self-management: Discovering cause and effect using self-monitoring data

Objective: To outline new design directions for informatics solutions that facilitate personal discovery with self-monitoring data. We investigate this question in the context of chronic disease self-management with the focus on type 2 diabetes.

Materials and methods: We conducted an observational qualitative study of discovery with personal data among adults attending a diabetes self-management education (DSME) program that utilized a discovery-based curriculum. The study included observations of class sessions, and interviews and focus groups with the educator and attendees of the program (n = 14).

Results: The main discovery in diabetes self-management evolved around discovering patterns of association between characteristics of individuals' activities and changes in their blood glucose levels that the participants referred to as "cause and effect". This discovery empowered individuals to actively engage in self-management and provided a desired flexibility in selection of personalized self-management strategies. We show that discovery of cause and effect involves four essential phases: (1) feature selection, (2) hypothesis generation, (3) feature evaluation, and (4) goal specification. Further, we identify opportunities to support discovery at each stage with informatics and data visualization solutions by providing assistance with: (1) active manipulation of collected data (e.g., grouping, filtering and side-by-side inspection), (2) hypotheses formulation (e.g., using natural language statements or constructing visual queries), (3) inference evaluation (e.g., through aggregation and visual comparison, and statistical analysis of associations), and (4) translation of discoveries into actionable goals (e.g., tailored selection from computable knowledge sources of effective diabetes self-management behaviors).

Discussion: The study suggests that discovery of cause and effect in diabetes can be a powerful approach to helping individuals to improve their self-management strategies, and that self-monitoring data can serve as a driving engine for personal discovery that may lead to sustainable behavior changes.

Conclusions: Enabling personal discovery is a promising new approach to enhancing chronic disease self-management with informatics interventions.