Research: The Virtual Diabetician
This research is one of my most accomplished ones as it is part of my PhD research when I was at Claremont Graduate University. The purpose of this research was to develop an application providing information about a diabetes type 2 treatment to patients.
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Type 2 diabetes is a chronic condition where the body struggles with insulin production or usage. While treatments exist, they’re often complex, and many patients end up feeling frustrated and overwhelmed—some even give up.
This was my motivation to create an application able to engage and motivate diabetes patients to follow the various steps of a given treatment.
Ha Ha ! Definitely not! And thanks for asking !
I do not have any type of medical training therefore and therefore, I obviously needed some resources for my research. Most of my knowledge about diabetes patients came from interacting with patients and physicians at Loma Linda University Medical Center.
​For the diabetes treatment, my advisor, Dr. Chatterjee, introduced me to a book “Goodbye Diabetes” by Dr. Wes Youngberg. This book was very interesting as it introduced an entirely behavioral treatment able to reverse type 2 diabetes. Even more interesting, each chapter of this book not only presented a behavioral aspect of the treatment (such as nutrition and exercise), but use storytelling as a method of proving their claim and keeping the reader interest.
It was perfect for a User Experience passionate like me.
I decided to create “The Virtual Diabetician”, an application providing information about each part of the treatment as described in the book, with the following components:
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Rather than text, I created a set of 3D virtual companions which would represent the physicians.
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Text-to-Voice technology was used to simulate the conversation patients would have with a physician.
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A side text panel was used for more complex instruction and a caption option was implemented.
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At the beginning of each treatment theme, I used narratives from the book as a method to persuade patients to adhere to the treatments.
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Each section also ended with a short quiz to keep the user engaged.
I am also glad I was able to use my programming background and knowledge of Unity platform to entirely develop the application from scratch.
Due to a strict deadline, I was only able to develop and test a fully functional prototype of the application based on only 4 chapters of the book. This prototype was evaluated by a set of diabetes patients who provided positive feedback.
I was also able to use mixed research analysis to develop a theoretical framework to measure the persuasive effectiveness of storytelling via a Virtual Narrator.​
The following papers were published as a result of this research.
A Quantitative Measurement Model for Persuasive Technologies Using Storytelling via a Virtual Narrator
Authors: Guillaume Faddoul, Samir Chatterjee
Publication date: 2020
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Description:
The study of persuasive techniques associated with technology is an important part of behavioral change research in information systems. Applied in areas such as education and healthcare, persuasive messages usually contain guidelines the users must follow in order to reach the targeted new behavior. We are studying the use of storytelling and virtual reality as persuasive methods. Those two techniques appear in several studies, together or separately. We base our study on an analysis of the current literature and a two steps survey combining 528 participants with valid responses. A factor analysis allowed us to develop a model measuring the persuasive effectiveness of storytelling via virtual narrator. This model is based on 31 items and 5 components. In addition, we are also presenting a questionnaire, with specific scoring guidelines, which can be used in any study using storytelling via virtual entity as mean of persuasion.
The Virtual Diabetician: A Prototype for a Virtual Avatar for Diabetes Treatment Using Persuasion Through
Authors: Guillaume Faddoul, Samir Chatterjee
Publication date: 2019
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Description:
Diabetes affects a large portion of the population and the current treatments only provide methods to manage the condition. Newer treatments do exist but the means to access such information is usually limited. This research proposes a solution by developing a prototype of a virtual avatar application providing diabetes treatment information to type 2 patients using persuasive techniques such as storytelling. Different instruments are used to evaluate the application usability, its persuasive power and the improvement of the diabetes condition. The results show that the application has good usability based on the system usability scale and lead to an improvement of the diabetes condition management. However, we acknowledge that certain technical barriers prevented the virtual diabetician to be more effective. The results indicate that the Virtual Diabetician does possess a set of components that can efficiently provide diabetes information to patients using an innovative medium of transmitting the information.
PHD Dissertation:
The Virtual Diabetician: A Virtual Platform Providing Diabetes Treatment Information through Storytelling and Virtual Companions
Authors: Guillaume Faddoul
Publication date: 2018
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Description:
Diabetes is a disease that affects a large amount of the population and the current treatments only provide methods to manage the condition. Innovative treatments with the potential to cure diabetes do exist. However, such information is usually only available to patients knowledgeable about the limited means of learning about those treatments, often requiring physical relocation. The objective of this research study is to propose a solution to this issue of having important information not efficiently reaching the population. After analyzing the expectations of diabetes patients toward treatments, I developed a prototype of the virtual companion application providing diabetes treatment information to type 2 diabetic patients using persuasion techniques such as storytelling.