Eddii Helps Children Manage Type 1 Diabetes

Farhaneh Ahmadi, PhD, has leveraged her own experience as a Type 1 diabetes patient to build a fun, engaging app that empowers children to manage life with T1D.

Challenge

Imagine for a moment that your child is one of the 64,000 people diagnosed each year in the US with Type 1 diabetes. All of a sudden their life (and yours) will never be the same again. There are hundreds of new things to learn and decide–how to monitor and track blood sugar changes, how to insulin dose, new vocabulary, all the factors besides food and insulin that affect blood glucose, how to interpret nutrition labels, what monitor to use, how to wear it correctly and deal with any chafing or discomfort, how to prepare for a school field trip or a sleepover, and on and on. Every day it’s something different. And every single day it must be managed.

Because managing a chronic health condition involves so much stress and strain, mental health issues often follow a diagnosis. For instance, people with Type 1 diabetes have a higher risk for anxiety and depression. People living with T1D often report how their condition makes them feel isolated and lonely. Classmates or friends don’t know what it is really like to experience a blood sugar low or vigilantly monitor which snacks they consume at a birthday party. Diabetes distress can also lead to burnout, where a person gets overwhelmed by the constant disease management and stops taking care of themselves.

While medical device companies continually strive to offer better products for monitoring and managing T1D, they offer little support in terms of helping patients and their families navigate the questions, challenges, and emotional landscape of living with the condition. Parents end up constantly prompting and reminding their children to make sure they stay on top of their diabetes management, leading to friction–to children it feels like nagging, to parents it feels like perpetual worry. Either way, it doesn’t help motivate and support the young person as they live with diabetes and adds pressure to an already difficult situation.

Origin Story

“When you get diagnosed with T1D, you have to start dealing with it every day,” says Farhaneh Ahmadi, PhD. “It never goes away. During the best of your times and the worst of your times, it is right there in front of you.”

Ahmadi was diagnosed with T1D 14 years ago, during the first year of her PhD in biochemistry at Cambridge in the UK. She remembers the incredible challenge it was to learn how to manage the condition while monitoring cells in the middle of a lab experiment or out on the River Cam during rowing practice at 5AM. Once, she had to knock on a neighbor’s door at 1AM, asking for juice when she hit a low and found herself out of stock.

Ahmadi ended up taking a few months off from her PhD to focus on her health and learn how to be insulin dependent. Like many people diagnosed with a chronic illness, she also had to learn to combat the negative thoughts and find the right motivation and support system to take charge of her health. She joined Diabetes UK, found other people who understood the challenges of the condition, big and small, and started to feel a little less alone.

It was this experience, of finding voices that could educate her and guide her as well as validate her feelings and frustrations living with the condition, that led her to imagine an interface that could help provide the same thing to others–something that made living with a chronic illness more manageable and less isolating.

“It really became the basis for what we created, which revolves around the user not feeling lonely and having a health buddy who is always there with you–who understands the effects of high and low glucose and who helps you manage it and manage your feelings about it.”

After finishing her PhD and spending years as a cancer researcher and then a healthcare consultant in the private sector, Ahmadi was ready to take on the challenge of building the tool she wished existed for herself all those years ago. Her vision was a platform that responded to real-time data, that was clinically-driven and outcomes-focused so that it had a real impact on users’ health, and that motivated its users to take ownership of their diabetes. Could you, she wondered, actually make it enjoyable for a child with T1D to engage with their blood glucose numbers and their health?

Under the Hood

Eddii is a next-generation diabetes app that helps people living with diabetes track their health. Eddii itself is a virtual in-app character that looks like a vibrant little leaf. Through games and amusing conversation, eddii engages users in their health, giving them the information and confidence they need to take action. Eddii also collects real-time data from its users’ devices and responds dynamically to the information it receives, so that its messages and configurations change depending on glucose numbers or feedback from the user.

“The number one thing we heard from children using eddii in a randomized clinical trial was ‘eddii makes me happy.’ It made children more enthusiastic to think about their food and medication,” Ahmadi says. The key was to make it fun. Eddii’s users can customize the character, changing its clothes, adding friends, or putting eddii on the beach or in outer space. As they use the interface, they earn hearts that enable them to play minigames (rigorously designed to be up to the exacting game standards of modern children) and can earn additional rewards that parents set up in the app.

“It really helps shift the dynamics between a parent and child. Instead of nagging their child to record their numbers every day or take insulin at the right time, the parent can track what they are doing on the interface and set a reward for them on the app, like a whole extra hour of TV time on the weekend!”

Following eddii’s initial launch in 2019, Ahmadi brought on Alonso Lucero as COO & Co-founder of the company. Lucero–a graduate of Cornell’s engineering masters program, concentrated in strategic operations, as well as the MBA program at Harvard Business School–leveraged his 10+ years of experience in digital health strategy and operations to expand eddii’s capabilities and ensure clinically-driven health outcomes. When he started with eddii, Lucero spent months wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to ensure he understood the challenges and nuances facing their users.

As they first go to market with eddii, they are focusing on the pediatric T1D population, because it is the population most in need, with plans to expand from there with a more sophisticated interface for adults. The core vision remains the same, however: to create a fun, supportive, educational interface that helps people living with diabetes take care of themselves and feel happier doing it. It’s integrated care that considers mental health and motivation as well as nutrition information and insulin management.

“We strive to understand what is actually going on in an individual user’s world and life and how we can meet them there to improve health outcomes,” emphasizes Ahmadi.

The Big Picture

StartUp Health is proud to support eddii as part of our newly-launched T1D Moonshot because of its comprehensive, holistic approach to chronic illness management. It not only addresses the logistics of care, but the internal motivations as well. Its smart, dynamic responses help ensure that its users do what they need to do to manage their diabetes daily and brings joy to what can be an overwhelming task.

With eddii, you can tell it has a founder who ‘gets it,’ who knows what it’s like to wake up and manage their diabetes on good days and bad, when they feel like it and when they don’t. Ahmadi’s own experience with T1D fuels a different kind of user interface that infuses the drudgery of recording numbers and checking sugar levels with charm and delight. It’s little wonder that 85% of the participants in their initial clinical study reported that they enjoy and prefer to use eddii rather than traditional glucose monitoring apps.

This results in children who are proactively engaged in their health management, leading to overall better results. As one father expressed following his child’s eddii experience, “This has been amazing! She’s never been this involved with her diabetes!” We’re proud to back eddii because of this commitment to improving health outcomes through patient engagement and how they’ve taken their time to test and verify their effectiveness. This situates them well to pursue big partnerships in the year ahead and quickly grow their distribution channels.

Join us in welcoming eddii to the StartUp Health family!

→ Connect with the eddii team via email.

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Eddii Helps Children Manage Type 1 Diabetes was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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