Dr Shetty and Wayne Soon. Photo courtesy of Diabetes WA
A ground-breaking new app developed by The Kids researchers may soon make exercising safer for young people with type 1 diabetes.
Regular exercise can add years to the lives of young people living with type 1 diabetes (T1D), but it can also play havoc with their blood glucose levels.
Consequently – and despite physical activity being critical to managing their diabetes – people with diabetes are often reluctant to exercise.
“Regular physical activity is recommended for people with type 1 diabetes because the health benefits of an active lifestyle play an important role in their treatment,” according to Dr Vinutha Shetty, who is head of exercise research at the Children’s Diabetes Centre at The Kids Research Institute Australia.
“It not only improves their cardiovascular and bone health, but also reduces their insulin requirements and improves blood lipid profiles,” Dr Shetty said. “Exercise also has considerable psychological and psychosocial benefits, such as improved quality of life and wellbeing.
“But exercise is also a challenge for people living with type 1 diabetes because the blood glucose response to exercise is unpredictable, increasing the risk of hypoglycaemia (low blood glucose levels).”
Dr Shetty, also an endocrinologist at Perth Children’s Hospital, said this fear of having a ‘hypo’ was the biggest barrier to young people with diabetes exercising – and the catalyst for Dr Shetty and the exercise research team to co-design a new smartphone app alongside young people with T1D to help them exercise safely.
Called acT1ve, the app contains exercise guidelines and tailored advice specifically for young people living with T1D – the first of its kind to do so.
“From our focus groups, young people told us that exercising safely was one of the biggest challenges they faced in managing diabetes and that’s where the idea of developing an exercise app specifically for them came from,” Dr Shetty said.
“acT1ve asks the user questions about the activity they are going to do, and based on this detailed information, it gives advice on when and what to eat, when to have insulin and how much insulin to have and when to check blood glucose levels. The advice is based on international exercise guidelines.”
The app was initially tested by a small group of young people with T1D to gauge their thoughts, with promising results. “The young people found acT1ve very useful, informative, extremely functional and there was high user satisfaction,” Dr Shetty said.
Dr Shetty and her team are midway through the clinical trial of acT1ve – a necessary step before the app can hopefully be approved for general use.
“Once the efficacy and safety of this app for diabetes self-management around exercise is established, we will identify pathways for regulatory approvals and development strategies to implement the app in the clinical setting,” Dr Shetty said.
“The whole point of developing the app is to get people who are reluctant to exercise to start exercising and build confidence and we hope that by preventing low blood glucose levels, acT1ve will encourage them to be physically active more frequently and gain the many benefits of exercise.”