Exploring the use of activity tracking and mobile phone based feedback integrated with health care records to increase activity levels and reduce sedentary behaviour in people with type 2 diabetes

Project Description

The benefits of exercise and reduced sedentary behavior on health and wellbeing are important for the whole population, but for those with type 2 diabetes they have particular benefits in enhancing blood glucose control. This proposal is to explore the feasibility of developing and testing a low cost intervention to increase activity levels in people with type 2 diabetes which is largely self managed but provides the facility to share self monitored data with health care professionals to facilitate holistic support. This will build on our previous development and testing of systems for self monitoring and sharing blood pressure data which is currently being implemented at scale, but will be novel in focusing on a parameter which is not usually monitored in a healthcare context and also integrating the data with the national diabetes database and its patient portal. This will support long term outcome measurement via routinely collected clinical data.
The development and testing of this intervention will follow the MRC guidance on testing complex interventions (ref) and the scope of this proposal is for consultation with patients and professionals on the proposed intervention. This will be followed by development a small scale implementation of the intervention (as developed in consultation with users) and process evaluation (ref) with 10 individuals to test feasibility. These stages are currently funded and will lead to a pilot trial to test proposed trial procedures and provide data to adequately plan a full scale clinical trial.