A digital lifestyle behaviour change intervention for the prevention of type 2 diabetes: A qualitative study exploring intuitive engagement with real-time glucose and physical activity feedback

Maxine Whelan, Francesca Denton, Claire Bourne, Andrew Kingsnorth, Lauren Sherar, Mark Orme, Dale Esliger

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    26 Citations (Scopus)
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    Abstract

    Background
    Mobile health technologies have advanced to now allow monitoring of the acute physiological responses to lifestyle behaviours. Our aim was to explore how people engaged with real-time feedback on their physical activity and glucose levels over several weeks.

    Methods
    Semi-structured interviews with 26 participants (61.5% female, 56.6 years) at moderate-to-high risk of developing type 2 diabetes were conducted. Interviews were completed after participants took part in an intervention comprising a flash glucose monitor (Freestyle Libre) and a physical activity monitor (Fitbit Charge 2). Purposive sampling ensured representation of ages, genders and group allocations.

    Results
    Inductive thematic analysis revealed how individuals intuitively used, interpreted and acted on feedback from wearable technologies. Six key themes emerged: triggers of engagement with the technologies, links between behaviour and health, lack of confidence, changes to movement behaviours, changes to diet and barriers to lifestyle behaviour change.

    Conclusions
    Our findings demonstrate that accessing behavioural and physiological feedback can increase self-awareness of how lifestyle impacts short-term health. Some participants noticed a link between the feedback presented by the two devices and changed their behaviour but many did not. Training and educational support, as well as efforts to optimize how feedback is presented to users, are needed to sustain engagement and behaviour change. Extensions of this work to involve people with diabetes are also warranted to explore whether behavioural and physiological feedback in parallel can encourage better diabetes self-management.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number130
    Number of pages11
    JournalBMC Public Health
    Volume21
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 12 Jan 2021

    Bibliographical note

    Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

    Keywords

    • Qualitative
    • Self-monitoring
    • Glucose
    • Physical activity
    • Wearables
    • Diabetes prevention

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

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