Gaming Your CGM ala Pokémon GO

New concepts always seem easier to explain when you can point to something that people already understand. Take the new Pokémon GO phenomenon.

About a decade ago I developed a game for kids with type 1 diabetes and we called it MysteryBGee™. It was designed as a way to reward kids for checking blood sugar and to encourage them to share their meter data through their GlucoMON® wireless transmission device. The telemonitoring system in the cloud picked a random number each day and anyone who had a bg # that day that matched the MysteryBGee number of the day won a small prize. If there were no matches then the person whose number was closest was the winner. I wrote a post last year about this experience here.

Given my concern with how the average person uses their cgm plus the often unreliable and inaccurate nature of cgm data, I was thinking about ways to encourage people to be more engaged with their blood sugars and the tools they use to manage.

Voila! Pokémon GO for CGM.

The receiver or phone would randomly assign a time slot to a Pokémon GO character and if the user happens to look at their cgm data within X minutes of that time slot they get to grab Squirtle.

Based on my previous studies of this kind of gaming with type 1 diabetes patients, I have no doubt that we could increase the frequency of cgm data review.

Want to know more about how to design, implement and test these gaming concepts? Give me a shout at kevin@sugarsurfing.com