Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Introduction

In the past years, we developed a telemonitoring service for young patients affected by Type 1 Diabetes. The service provides data to the clinical staff and offers an important tool to the parents, that are able to oversee in real time their children. The aim of this work was to analyze the parents’ perceived usefulness of the service.

Methods

The service was tested by the parents of 31 children enrolled in a seven-day clinical trial during a summer camp. To study the parents’ perception we proposed and analyzed two questionnaires. A baseline questionnaire focused on the daily management and implications of their children’s diabetes, while a post-study one measured the perceived benefits of telemonitoring. Questionnaires also included free text comment spaces.

Results

Analysis of the baseline questionnaires underlined the parents’ suffering and fatigue: 51% of total responses showed a negative tendency and the mean value of the perceived quality of life was 64.13 in a 0–100 scale. In the post-study questionnaires about half of the parents believed in a possible improvement adopting telemonitoring. Moreover, the foreseen improvement in quality of life was significant, increasing from 64.13 to 78.39 (p-value = 0.0001). The analysis of free text comments highlighted an improvement in mood, and parents’ commitment was also proved by their willingness to pay for the service (median = 200 euro/year).

Discussion

A high number of parents appreciated the telemonitoring service and were confident that it could improve communication with physicians as well as the family’s own peace of mind.

Keywords

Home telecare ehealth self care telemedicine telemetry

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Lane

Shivers

Zisser

. Continuous glucose monitors: current status and future developments. Curr Opin Endocrinol Diabetes Obes 2013; 20(2): 106–111.

Shashaj

Sulli

. Difference in insulin usage patterns with pubertal development in children with type 1 diabetes during transition from multiple daily injections to continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (csii) and through the csii treatment. Diabetes Technol Ther 2009; 11(12): 767–774.

Cobelli

Renard

Kovatchev

. Artificial pancreas: Past, present, future. Diabetes 2011; 60(11): 2672–2682.

Thabit

Hovorka

. Coming of age: the artificial pancreas for type 1 diabetes. Diabetologia 2016; 59(9): 1795–1805.

Helgeson

Becker

Escobar

et al.

Families with children with diabetes: Implications of parent stress for parent and child health. J Pediatr Psychol 2012; 37(4): 467–478.

Hesketh

Wake

Cameron

. Health-related quality of life and metabolic control in children with type 1 diabetes: a prospective cohort study. Diabetes Care 2004; 27(2): 415–20.

Kobos

Imiela

. Factors affecting the level of burden of caregivers of children with type 1 diabetes. Appl Nurs Res 2015; 28(2): 142–149.

Coffey

. Parenting a child with chronic illness: a metasynthesis. Pediatr Nurs 2006; 32(1): 51–59.

Malerbi

Negrato

Gomes

. Assessment of psychosocial variables by parents of youth with type 1 diabetes mellitus. Diabetol Metab Syndr 2012; 4: 48–48.

10.

Yang

Iqbal

Ching

et al.

Trends in the growth of literature of telemedicine: A bibliometric analysis. Comput Methods Programs Biomed 2015; 122(3): 471–479.

11.

Ekeland

Bowes

Flottorp

. Effectiveness of telemedicine: A systematic review of reviews. Int J Med Inform 2010; 79(11): 736–771.

12.

Finet

Le Bouquin Jeannes

Dameron

et al.

Review of current telemedicine applications for chronic diseases. Toward a more integrated system?

Irbm 2015; 36(3): 133–157.

13.

Lanzola

Losiouk

Del Favero

et al.

Remote blood glucose monitoring in mhealth scenarios: a review. Sensors 2016; 16(12): 2–16.

14.

Del Favero

Boscari

Messori

et al.

Randomized summer camp cross-over trial in 5–9 year old children: outpatient wearable artificial pancreas is feasible and safe. Diabetes Care 2016; 39(7): 1180–1185.

15.

Capozzi

Lanzola

. Utilizing information technologies for lifelong monitoring in diabetes patients. J Diabetes Sci Technol 2011; 5(1): 55–62.

16.

Lanzola

Capozzi

Serina

et al.

Bringing the artificial pancreas home: telemedicine aspects. J Diabetes Sci Technol 2011; 5(6): 1381–1386.

17.

Capozzi

Lanzola

. A generic telemedicine infrastructure for monitoring an artificial pancreas trial. Comput Methods Programs Biomed 2013; 110(3): 343–353.

18.

Lanzola

Scarpellini

Di Palma

et al.

Monitoring artificial pancreas trials through agent-based technologies: A case report. J Diabetes Sci Technol 2014; 8(2): 216–224.

19.

Lanzola

Toffanin

Di Palma

et al.

Designing an artificial pancreas architecture: the ap@home experience. Med Biol Eng Comput 2015; 53(12): 1271–1283.

20.

Luijf

DeVries

Zwinderman

et al.

Day and night closed-loop control in adults with type 1 diabetes: a comparison of two closed-loop algorithms driving continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion versus patient self-management. Diabetes Care 2013; 36(12): 3882–3887.

21.

Zisser

Renard

Kovatchev

et al.

Multicenter closed-loop insulin delivery study points to challenges for keeping blood glucose in a safe range by a control algorithm in adults and adolescents with type 1 diabetes from various sites. Diabetes Technol Ther 2014; 16(10): 613–622.

22.

Kropff

Del Favero

Place

et al.

2 month evening and night closed-loop glucose control in patients with type 1 diabetes under free-living conditions: a randomised crossover trial. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol 2015; 3(12): 939–947.

23.

Renard

Farret

Kropff

et al.

Day and night closed-loop glucose control in patients with type 1 diabetes under free-living conditions: Results of a single-arm 1-month experience compared with a previously reported feasibility study of evening and night at home. Diabetes Care 2016; 39(7): 1151–1160.

24.

Patek

Magni

Dassau

et al.

Modular closed-loop control of diabetes. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 2012; 59(11): 2986–2999.

25.

Toffanin

Messori

Di Palma

et al.

Artificial pancreas: model predictive control design from clinical experience. J Diabetes Sci Technol 2013; 7(6): 1470–1483.

26.

Mairinger

Annex VII: Questionnaire on Telemedicine. In: Ferrer-Roca

Sosa-Iudicissa

(eds). Handbook of telemedicine 1998; vol. 54, IOS press, pp. 242–245.

27.

Yip

Chang

Chan

et al.

Development of the telemedicine satisfaction questionnaire to evaluate patient satisfaction with telemedicine: a preliminary study. J Telemed Telecare 2003; 9(1): 46–50.

28.

Camparo

. A geometrical approach to the ordinal data of Likert scaling and attitude measurements: The density matrix in psychology. J Math Psychol 2013; 57(1-2): 29–42.

29.

R Development Core Team. R: A language and environment for statistical computing, Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2008.

30.

Thelwall M. Heart and soul: Sentiment strength detection in the social web with sentistrength. In: Proceedings of the CyberEmotions, 2013, pp.1–4.

31.

Capozzi D and Lanzola G. An agent-based architecture for home care monitoring and education of chronic patients. In: Complexity in Engineering, 2010. COMPENG'10, 22 February 2010, pp.138–140. IEEE.

32.

Lanzola

Ginardi

Russo

et al.

Delivering and assessing learning material through gquest: A case study on patient education. Int J Mobile Blended Learn 2014; 6(3): 52–68.

33.

Streisand

Swift

Wickmark

et al.

Pediatric parenting stress among parents of children with type 1 diabetes: the role of self-efficacy, responsibility, and fear. J Pediatr Psychol 2005; 30(6): 513–521.

34.

Sullivan-Bolyai

Deatrick

Gruppuso

et al.

Constant vigilance: Mothers’ work parenting young children with type 1 diabetes. Pediatr Nurs 2003; 18(1): 21–29.

35.

Guljas

Ahmed

Chang

et al.

Impact of telemedicine in managing type 1 diabetes among school-age children and adolescents: an integrative review. Pediatr Nurs 2014; 29(3): 198–204.

36.

Carroll

DiMeglio

Stei

et al.

Using a cell phone-based glucose monitoring system for adolescent diabetes management. Diabetes Educ 2011; 37(1): 59–66.

37.

Chase

Pearson

Wightman

et al.

Modem transmission of glucose values reduces the costs and need for clinic visits. Diabetes Care 2003; 26(5): 1475–1479.

38.

Rami

Popow

Horn

et al.

Telemedical support to improve glycemic control in adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus. Eur J Pediatr 2006; 165(10): 701–705.

39.

Troncone

Bonfanti

Iafusco

et al.

Evaluating the experience of children with type 1 diabetes and their parents taking part in an artificial pancreas clinical trial over multiple days in a diabetes camp setting. Diabetes Care 2016; 39(12): 2158–2164.

40.

Lanzola

Ginardi

Mazzanti

et al.

Gquest: Modeling patient questionnaires and administering them through a mobile platform application. Comput Methods Programs Biomed 2014; 117(2): 277–291.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.12 MB

0.15 MB

Parental evaluation of a telemonitoring service for children with Type 1 Diabetes

Abstract

Introduction

Methods

Results

Discussion

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material