Sharing is caring: Designing a value-sensitive mhealth platform for sharing type 1 diabetes management within families

Within a mobile-technology enhanced educational framework, this study investigates needs and expectations of children (aged 8-14) with type 1 diabetes, and their parents, to define the functionalities of PAL Inform, a web-based monitoring module. The aim is to design it as a tool for parents to be informed on the educational progresses, as well on diabetes-related data, of their children without violating their values (privacy, trust, autonomy). Through a set of co-design activities, carried out with 39 children and 45 parents, it was possible to define which kind of information parents would monitor and children (especially pre-adolescents), in turn, would share, without compromising family dynamics: i.e. glycaemic values and trends, insulin doses, carbohydrates intake, generic emotional status, educational progresses on diabetes-related knowledge. Leveraging on these insights, a set of functional requirements was elicited for the future monitoring module implementation.