Patients’ Experience of New Technologies and Digitalization in Diabetes Care in Germany

Abstract

Background: Little is little known about how people with diabetes experience advancing digitization and new technologies in diabetes. Research question: What are the attitudes of people with diabetes (or, in the case of children with diabetes, their parents) toward digitization and advancing technology in diabetology? What significant advantages and disadvantages do they see, and how do they assess current developments of digitization in diabetology (eg, hybrid closed-loop systems, do-It-Yourself (DIY) closed-loop systems, data protection, and data donation)? Material and method: 3,427 people with diabetes (47.7% female, 65.6% type 1 diabetes (T1D), 25.5% type 2 diabetes (T2D), 8.1% parents of children with diabetes; 0.8% other type of diabetes, age 49.2 ± 19.3 years) were interviewed with an online survey. Results: Overall, survey participants had a very positive attitude toward digitization (82.6%) and considered the potential for optimizing diabetology through digitization to be very high (78.8%). The highest rated advantages of digitization were “greater personal responsibility and self-determination in therapy” (80.0%), “better quality of treatment” (80.0%), and “better communication with the doctor/diabetes team” (77.3%), while the highest rated disadvantages were the “error-proneness of digital applications” (35.9%), the “risk of misuse of patient data” (32.3%) and the “fear that digitization will replace the doctor in many cases” (31.1%). The possibility of evaluating and analyzing glucose data by means of software, and AID systems, and the possibility of improving the interoperability of the various applications are currently rated as the most significant topics. Conclusions: The vast majority of people with diabetes are very positive about new technologies in diabetology and expect that it will improve and simplify their diabetes therapy and reduce the burdens associated with diabetes. In particular, people with type 1 diabetes have high expectations for AID systems, viewing them as a kind of “technical cure” for their diabetes.