Conception and Realization of a Mobile Crowdsensing Application for Support and Empowerment of Diabetes Patients

Diabetes is an increasingly common chronic disease. Not only in the Western World but across the globe. Statistics show, that 10.3% of men and 9.6% of women in the European Union aged 25 or older are forced to live with this disease, and the numbers are rising [1]. It is a chronic disorder of the metabolism, and a number of dangerous complications can arise if the medical treatment is not supervised carefully. These complications can be lethal, and severely reduce the quality of life of every individual patient. Thoroughly following the medical advices requires considerable discipline of the patient. This project aims to help the patients suffering diabetes, by providing a healthcare application to support them in their daily self-care. The application is called Track your Diabetes, and is designed to be a daily companion for the patient. Moreover, it is a mobile crowdsensing application and the collected data can empower researchers to improve the knowledge about the disease. Patient education, empowerment, and practical self-management to help deal with symptoms, is achieved by tracking diabetes
related data such as the blood glucose level and weight. Depending on the data, the users can receive automated feedbacks, in order to improve their self-management. The application is questionnaire-based. This means, that the application only tracks data based on the questionnaires published. Patients can then share their data with their medical attendant who, in turn, can use it to improve their treatment methods. Designing this application, and providing prove for its feasibility by implementing it, is the central topic of this thesis. One major requirement was for the application to use the interface of a given RESTful API backend. This backend is planned to be a central database for the relevant data of all users. This work shows, how the application was designed and implemented for the operating system Android.