ABSTRACT
Medical practitioners around the world use the aid of mobile health (mHealth) technology to provide better, efficient, and convenient health care. With this advantage of mHealth technology, different health applications targeting various diseases were developed. For instance, there are numerous mHealth applications specifically made for patients diagnosed with diabetes. Majority of these provide the standard functionality of blood glucose monitoring. However, persuasion to keep healthy is not a major concern for developers. Apart from recording, these applications lack behavior change techniques used to encourage the user to develop better health habits and lifestyle.
SugarTraces is a motivational mobile health application designed with persuasive components such as feedback and reward system. The feedback system is implemented to motivate the user to continuously use the application while maintaining healthy blood glucose levels. The streaks, achievements, and feedback messages are applied to add gamified and persuasive elements to the application.
SugarTraces was tested by forty-five (45) users over a period of at least five (5) days. The focus of the testing phase was to determine the participants’ impression of the feedback messages and the different gamified elements in the application. General overall result is that majority of the users agree that SugarTraces can help manage diabetes. It has an overall score of 4.64 out of 5. Meanwhile, keeping a streak has an overall score of 3.91 out of 5 due to users initially not knowing what it is for.
