You are what you eat : serious gaming for type 1 diabetic persons

It is important that patients follow recommended treatment regimens and live in a healthy way. This can be summarized as self management. Serious games can help patients with this. Chronic diseases such as diabetes involve a lot of self management. We developed a game to educate diabetic children about carbohydrates using research from game design, game experience evaluation and other educational diabetic games. After this we made an online survey to see how much the average person knows about carbohydrates and how this compares to people with diabetes. We tested a prototype of our game on primary school children and adjusted the game based on the results. Finally, it was tested on diabetic children. The results show that the children really liked the game. The children filled out a written test before and after playing the game, to see if the game has a learning effect. These tests do not show big differences, there are some results that suggest an increase in knowledge, but more research is needed to be sure.