April 9, 2010
Posted by Elizabeth Han
Bant: A Stylish Diabetes iPhone App from Toronto’s University Health Network
Toronto’s Medicine 2.0 scene is heating up!
Hot on the heels of my recent visit to the Center for Global eHealth Innovations in Toronto, the Center released an exciting new (and free!) iPhone app for Type I diabetics to track their blood sugar: Bant.
Bant is short for Banting, the Canadian who discovered insulin at – where else? – University of Toronto in 1921. And not only is the name stylish, but so is the design.
I downloaded the app yesterday and gave it a spin, with impressive results:
- The first screen is Readings (left), where you select the meal for which you want to add a glucose reading. Then you can simply drag and drop the appropriate marker to the desired time and concentration on the graph. The blue section indicates the goal concentration range.
- As you accumulate data points, you can view a graphical summary under Trends (left).
- Individual readings can also be adjusted from the Bant Book screen (middle), which includes the options to add text notes and/or share your thoughts via Twitter (right).
- Another great feature is Community, which taps you into the diabetes conversations on Twitter, identified by certain hashtags.
- Finally, there are terrific options (shown below) to export the data to your Google Health account and to email (as a .csv attachment).
So who does this help?
Bant is targeted towards Type I diabetics, especially children and teenagers – a demographic that often has trouble with tracking blood glucose regularly. It is hoped that the community and sharing features of Bant will keep it a hit long after the novelty of entering readings into an iPhone/iPod Touch wears off.
An interview with Dr. Joseph Cafazzo, who leads the project, also hinted at rewarding users with iTunes credits to maintain an incentive for adherence. Talks are in progress with Apple to make this a reality.
Personally, I also wonder how Bant would look on the iPad. If we ever get to the point where tablets become fixtures in doctor’s offices, you could easily bring up a patient’s data on Google Health or from the .csv file (sent from patient to doctor by secure email). Popping up the history of diabetes-related tweets could also be a stimulating topic of conversation.
Looking ahead…
You know, people used to scoff at me when I said that Twitter could be used to track blood sugar. I couldn’t even win them to microblogging, much less health microblogging. Well, now here’s something we can all try for ourselves, which I think is the key.
Just because an app is out there doesn’t mean it will be adopted in great numbers. However, I feel strongly that just by innovating and making projects like Bant available for free, the groundwork is being laid for design to get better and better.
Things have to be used before we can even think about how to make them more usable. I’m so glad we have the opportunity to do so!
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