Diabetes emoticons designed by patient experts! 

The idea for the Diabetes Emoticons mobile application/sticker pack came from a participatory design workshop sponsored by HealthDesignBy.Us. Patient experts with type 1 diabetes and their caregivers worked with a multidisciplinary team of University of Michigan students, faculty, and staff, and outside community partners to work through the design thinking process (empathy, defining the problem, ideating solutions, paper prototyping, and iterative testing). Patients and caregivers were active participants throughout the process and in the co-design of solutions. 

The Problem: "It’s annoying to get lots of text messages from your mom about diabetes stuff when you are a teenager with type 1 diabetes.” 

The Solution: Make communication easier between parent and child through the use of diabetes emoticons. 

Paper prototypes of the icons were developed by type 1 diabetes experts Reece and Olivia Ohmer and their mother, Amy Ohmer. U-M Stamps School of Art & Design students created the illustrations (Margot Robert) and user interface mock-ups (Xiaoying He), and students from Michigan Hackers created the applications for Android and iPhone (Jawad Nasser and Connor Krupp). Jacob Dwyer (U-M Stamps Alumnus) revised and created icons for version 2.0 of the app, and Logan Light contributed code for version 2.0. Product Strategy was provided by Joyce Lee, MD, MPH, Nancy Benovich Gilby, Emily Dhadphale, and Ashley Garrity. 

This work was supported by the University of Michigan Department of Pediatrics Charles Woodson Clinical Research Fund, Child Health Evaluation and Research Unit, the University of Michigan Provost Global Challenges Grant, and the University of Michigan Health System Fostering Innovation Grant.

For more information about the Diabetes Emoticons, check out this blogpost from the DiabetesMine blog: Hacking Health Care Emoji for Diabetes.

Read the privacy policy for Diabetes Emoticon Stickers here.