Interface Digital Labs

Life with Diabetes USB flash drives

The USB flash drives for the Living with Diabetes project came back from the manufacturer. This is an initial batch of 150 drives, which will be used in the evaluation of the Life with Diabetes project. It was created by Interface Digital for Queens University, in a project for the Sugar Bureau.

Using Life with Diabetes, patients can get quick access to facts about their condition, watch case studies, take quizzes, and monitor their activity levels and diet. A food diary application allows them to record and analyse their diet, and save each day they record for later comparison. They can then set goals to aim for, and see if they achieved them. The application is written in Flash, and uses MDM’s Zinc application to create a standalone runtime application, and also interact with the embedded SQLite database.

There were several advantages to using a USB flash drive over a CD.
One is that they become more personal. They can be worn around the neck, or put on a keyring. Users can take it with them, and update their food diary as they go.
They can use it at home, work, college, the library, even at the doctors.

Another advantage is that it allows the units to work as a standalone product. Data can be written to the memory stick itself, making it a totally portable solution, and with no installation required (this was another benefit of using Zinc over Adobe AIR). We also made it so that the application asks to launch when inserted into a Windows computer, though this does depend somewhat on the machine’s configuration.

We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for people with Type 2 Diabetes to begin using the drive and work with the application. In some ways this initial barrier is the biggest drawback of using any physical medium to deliver interactive content. With a website, a bigger problem is stopping users from clicking away.