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Diabetes Connections | Type 1 Diabetes
"The Worst Game Ever" - Sam Glassenberg wants to change how we learn about T1D
00:34:00
Learning through video games isn’t new – there are games aimed at almost every profession, even healthcare. Sam Glassenberg is the founder of Level Ex which makes those types of learning games – and when his daughter was diagnosed...
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- [00:05]
A
This week on Diabetes Connections. Learning through video games isn't new. There are games aimed at almost every profession, including healthcare. Sam Glassenberg is the founder of Level X, which makes those types of learning games. And when his daughter was diagnosed with type one, he was appalled at the onboarding process. He says it was full of frustration and punishment for the parents, patient and the caregiver. And he called it the worst game ever. So Sam developed Level 1, a new free game to teach all about type 1 diabetes. We're talking about how it works, who it's for, and what makes it different from those gamification flops you may remember from years ago. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your healthcare provider. Hello and welcome to Diabetes Connections. I'm your host, Stace Stacey Sims. We aim to educate and inspire about diabetes with a focus on people who use insulin. I gotta tell you, I was very excited to talk to Sam Glasenberg about this because I love video games. Maybe I should say I loved video games. It's amazing to me. I played so many video games when I was a kid. I am a child of the 80s. So many of you know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about games on my phone. I'm talking about my Atari 2600, how amazing I was at Pitfall and then the arcade in my local neighborhood, which was also the video store, which could not be more of a cliche of Gen X, but there you have it. I spent so much time in the arcade, my top games were Galaga Pole Position, which was an amazing driving game, and Tapper, which is a video game based, I kid you not, on serving beer. It even had little taps you would pull. We were kids and boy, that was a fun and exciting game. We thought that was the height of sophistication. Unfortunately, much like what happened to me with comic books, as I got a little bit older, I realized there were fewer and fewer girls around and I got some unwanted attention. And, I mean, you can fill in the blanks there, right? Video game arcades and comic book stores in the 1980s were certainly not a welcoming place for a teenage girl. Hopefully they're a little better now. I'm. Well, that's a different podcast. But I tried to play video games on my PC back in the day, which, imagine this kids, was words and very few pictures. And I enjoyed those, but not quite as much. And I haven't really played video games since. My kids tell me that eventually I'll get back into them. They want to get me a Switch, a Nintendo Switch, so maybe I'll get back into it. I'm actually looking at a mini Galaga machine. My husband got it for me for my birthday a couple of years ago. We had an 80s birthday party, and that was part of the decor. But it's here in my office, and it's legit. It's got a bunch of different versions of games on it, and it's a lot of fun. But when we talk about video games and learning, I was stunned to find out how widespread this is, and not just the publicly accessible learning games that you can get on your phone. So stuff that is meant for industry, There are thousands of games designed to teach different things on a professional level. My guest this week is Sam Glasenberg. He is the founder of Level X. As I said, they make learning games for medical professionals. And we spoke the very day in April that Level 1, the game we're talking about for Type 1 diabetes, was released to the public. So Sam's daughter was diagnosed at age 5 back in 2019, and. And like most of us, he found the way he was supposed to learn about type 1 Very frustrating and very overwhelming. You know, some people say it's like drinking from a fire hose. I think I said in one of my books, it's like drinking from the ocean. It's just. It's an unbelievable learning process, whether you are a caregiver or if you're a person with type one. I still feel like 18 years in, we're still learning stuff. And like many of us, Sam decided to use his professional skills to help not just himself, but the diabetes community. This was one of the things that surprised me the most about the diabetes community and doesn't surprise me at all anymore. Right. When someone is diagnosed with type 1 or their child is or a loved one, they take the skills that they have and they figure out a way to help the community. Whether that is coding, whether that's all the people in the DIY community, whether that's creating a video game or using a microphone. Right. A lot of podcasters start out that way. It's such good stuff, and we appreciate it so much. Gotta put in a quick reminder for Mom's Night Out. We have two events coming up this fall. September in Minneapolis, October in Phoenix. This is an event for moms of kids with diabetes and Women with type 1. It is so much fun. It will help you create or strengthen your local community. You will meet other moms and women with Type one at this event and you will have a blast. So head on over to diabetes-connections.com and and click on the Mom's Night out tab to take advantage of the Early Bird special for both events. My conversation with Sam Glasenberg right after this One of the things we love the most about the Dexcom G6 is that it helped Benny become more independent. But maybe not in the way you're thinking. I mean, remote monitoring using the Dexcom share and follow let us be more confident letting him do more away from home, with friends or at camp. But just the Design change of G6 meant Benny could use one hand to get to insert the sensor. He was 14. He didn't want our help anymore. It was perfect timing. Dexcom G7 is even more simple to use and gives effortless diabetes management that fits into your lifestyle without the disruptions. Ease of use helps everybody and I'm grateful the Dexcom product designers kept that in mind with G7. Learn more go to diabetes-connections.com and click on the Dexcom logo. Sam welcome to Diabetes Connections and congratulations. As you and I are talking, this is launch day.
- [05:58]
B
Today is launch day. After many, many years, today the game finally launches.
- [06:04]
A
How are you doing?
- [06:05]
B
I'm doing great. Like we have so much support from our partners beyond type 1 breakthrough T1D. The reaction just since we posted the teaser trailer a few weeks ago has been overwhelming. Mostly though, I'm feeling relieved of guilt because we've had a few hundred endocrinologists and diabetes educators and camp counselors and parents on the beta over you know, the last year and basically the reaction we would consistently got is why haven't you launched this yet? We need this now. Launch it. What's wrong with you?
- [06:33]
A
Okay, well, we probably should back up and explain what is Level one?
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B
Tell me High level Level one is a casual, captivating mobile video game that trains your brain how to manage type 1 diabetes.
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A
Gosh, so many questions about this. This is not an easy condition to learn.
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B
No.
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A
So tell me about why you decided to do this.
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B
So I'm a video game developer. I've spent my career. I used to work at LucasArts making Star wars games. I've made games for Hunger Games and Mission Impossible and games for doctors and all sorts. That's my career. Five years ago that became my second job and my first job is I became a full time pancreas because my middle daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and the onboarding experience was absolutely terrible. I actually, you know, you don't sleep much, so I think I Actually like wrote it down and made a little blog about, you know, analyzing how terrible it was from the standpoint of, you know, a game designer. It was really like, basically, you know, Friday, your life is normal. The next day you're responsible for injecting a lethal drug into your kid multiple times a day. And I remember like walking out of the hospital and they gave us this one page. I call it the guide to not killing your own kid.
- [07:54]
A
Oh, for God's sakes.
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B
This is, this, I, I'm, I'm putting it behind me here. But basically like, this is, this is from like the best children's hospital in the Chicago area. And like, they're great, they're great, but this is what they give you. It is a scratched a piece of paper just filled with carb ratios and sensitivity factors and rounding rules and like random instructions. Only give a correction dose if it's been at least three hours since the last rapid acting insulin. Like just. It took me and my wife a year to actually understand what this means and how to manage this disease. Now keep in mind, I'm a Stanford trained computer engineer and my wife is a pediatrician. So like we're the diabetes dream team. And I was like, this is horrible. I am learning how to manage this disease. Like, eventually I figure it out, but I'm like, I'm learning how to manage this disease through trial and error on my own kid, which is brutal. Brutal. And this is, this is stupid. So we fixed it. So I come from video games. Video games are the best way to develop a mental model of a complex system. Whether it's SimCity teaching you how to how a city works, whether it's Angry Birds training your brain, you know, how to predict parabolic flight. Video games are very, very, very good at this. And so I was like this, this needs to be a video game. So sat down, basically borrowed video game mechanics from some of the most popular games in the App Store if you've ever played. There's like these particle puzzle games. They're gorgeous. They're played by literally like a billion people. You know, where you're moving around fluids and particles and rhythm games and things like that. We borrowed those mechanics to create level one, which is a video game. You play it with one thumb. You just play it on your phone. It's gorgeous. It looks like any game you'd play in the App store, only there's 60 levels, each level's two minutes long. And at the end of it, you know everything about MDI and how to manage type 1 diabetes, at least for the first six months.
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A
I'm laughing. This is a first for me. In 10 years of podcasting, we will hopefully put this on YouTube because Sam has come prepared with. With video and presentations. And it's. I'm watching this in a way that I generally don't do when we're doing podcast interviews, so thank you for that.
- [10:16]
B
It's video game. I can't, you know, I can't explain it with hand. Wavy interpretive dance. You have to just go to the app store and download it and play it yourself. Level one is like the Matrix. You can't be told what level one is. You have to play it for yourself.
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A
So, you know, it's interesting, Sam, because I was a big video game player as a kid and a teenager. I am older, so my entry was Atari. And the video store where we all played Pac man. And Dragon Quest was like, maybe it was Dragonlance. It was like this crazy game.
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B
Dragon Quest, the one with like the 3D.
- [10:50]
A
Right. It was 50 cents and so nobody could afford to play it. That was my entry into video games. And I don't play a lot anymore, but my first quest.
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B
Do you play Candy Crush?
- [10:58]
A
No, I don't do any. I play wordle.
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B
Wordle? You play wordle? All right. But you still. You're still playing.
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A
Okay, I'm still playing. I'm still gaming, but my first.
- [11:07]
B
We're not playing Call of Duty. That's okay.
- [11:08]
A
We've knowing that I'm in the minority, most likely. Who is the audience for this? Is it the parent that gets the diagnosis like you all did? Is it a teenager? Is it a young adult? Who do you hope will play and learn this?
- [11:22]
B
Yes. So we very deliberately chose both game mechanics, like the particle puzzle, the rhythm game, and the. You notice the visual style is super casual. Like, it kind of looks a little bit Candy Crush esque. Why is that? These are the games that are played by everybody. You know, we. We went through multiple visual styles while we were designing this. We deliberately went with the one that appeals to the broadest audience because you get diagnosed with this disease at any age. You know, if you're obviously in our scenario five, right. Most of this is going to be managed by caregivers, not just parents, but also babysitters and school nurses and teachers and grandparents, and everybody takes the village. But obviously, if you're older, you know, even a teenager. Right. You're managing this yourself. So the design point was really to create a game with really, like the lowest possible reading level. Like you'll actually notice we've had some kids, they can actually play the game and they don't get all the nuances of like carb ratios and things like that if you're six years old. But they do get a lot of the key ideas around managing lows and highs just from playing the game. Even not even being really fully literate. Yeah. So trying to keep the reading level as low as possible and make it work for the broadest possible audience. I don't want you to have to spend 20 minutes learning how to play the game. The game you play with one thumb, one button. All you're doing is dosing insulin. It's super simple. It's the easiest game to play and you just start making your way through it. And finally, when you're at level 40 or 50 now, you're like managing ketones and dynamic carb ratios.
- [12:52]
A
Yeah, I loaded it this morning and went through it a little bit. And it is super simple. And it is. I was also really pleased to see that while it's teaching, it's not saying this is the only way. Right. There's messages throughout that say, hey, we're going to play the game this way. Dr. May do this another way. This is the basic of this. Your range may be set differently. So kudos to you for that. Which may sound like a really obvious thing, but, you know, you've been in the community long enough to know that there isn't really one. I mean, you gotta put insulin in, you gotta know where your blood sugar is, but there isn't one way to do this. So I applaud you for that too.
- [13:26]
B
It's the credit to the endocrinologists who helped us with the game. So we've been playing with, like I said, testing with hundreds of diabetes educators and endocrinologists and parents and just getting all that feedback, like, oh, I would recommend differently or caveat this. Even subtle things in the game like you can three star any level without being in range 100% of the time. Because like that really subtle thing with diabetes that we're not trying to achieve perfection here, don't try. It's impossible. You'll stress yourself out. As long as you're within range within, you know, a reasonable period of time, three stars, great job. Move on to the next level.
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A
Yeah, that's great. I didn't get to that part. That would make me crazy if you had to be perfect because, you know, with me, that's not part of the package.
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B
So unreal. Totally unrealistic.
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A
Yeah. Did you get Any other goal is.
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B
To reduce stress, not create more.
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A
Did you get feedback from the endos? I'm curious, what other stuff did you change or anything that you want to share? Anything that surprised you?
- [14:18]
B
Oh, there's all sorts of things that have changed over the course of the game. The order, the sequencing. We actually at one point even had a version where we were like, really? So you notice, like, the foods digest at different speeds in the game. We actually had a version where we really stretched that out so there were certain foods where you would have to actually do multiple injections over time to really, like, get the optimal curve. And the feedback that we got was that's too much for, you know, for the, like, most of the patients we're trying to get to here. So dial that back. But that's just one of many examples. You're smiling.
- [14:54]
A
Why I'm laughing because just last night. So my son is 20. We rarely talk about dosing anymore. I have not given him dosing advice in years. And we ate a very unusual for us, super high fat, like, meal, like one of those big treat meals, like, he was like, craving. We're like, okay, great.
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B
And I said, you know, pizza here in Chicago.
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A
Yeah. I was like, you might want to change, you know, give an extended dose or measure that in a couple. And he looked at me like I had three heads, like, are you kidding? Like, leave. First of all, leave me alone. Second of all, I've got this. And third of all, I'm not telling you what my numbers are going to be, so leave me alone. It was funny, but I. Exactly. It might be a little bit too much, but there are some people who are going to do that. They're going to learn that on their own.
- [15:37]
B
The beauty of mobile games is we're just going to keep updating it. So that'll be for, you know, level 70, 80. We're going to continue to add new features, things people ask for. But at some point, you know, like, the demand for this has become so high. We were having people that were sharing the beta with their patients when they probably weren't supposed to. So we just. We needed to get it out the door.
- [15:58]
A
Well, you know, I always say it's. It's. We all learn in different styles, right? So someone might want to read a book, someone might want to hear a podcast, someone might want to watch a video, someone's going to want to play a game. But one of the concerns that I had for you, and I don't know that this is comparable, but back in the 2010s, like from 2010 to 2014 or so, there was this big trend of gamification of diabetes where a lot of companies were trying to launch apps where, you know, if you check your blood sugar and you click the little monster, it'll check in and give you points and it'll give you competition and it'll make diabetes a game. And that was a big failure because nobody wants to think about diabetes more than they have to. It turns out people don't want to play a game around their diabetes. They want their diabetes to be in the background as much as humanly possible. This is not quite that, but are. Are you concerned? Because that trend really came and went right back to our conversation. But first, Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Omnipod.
- [17:00]
B
Did you hear the pod drop?
- [17:01]
A
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- [17:48]
B
I love this question. I have now built basically two game studios that make games for doctors, medical games, and you will never hear me use the word gamification. And the reason is not that it's not descriptive, it's just that it is so stigmatized because almost 100% of the examples of gamification that we can all think of are terrible. They're terrible. In the video games industry, we have distilled the neurochemical recipe for driving learning among any audience. We know how to hit the perfect balance of reward and frustration, challenge and skill to maximize the release of dopamine in the brain to maximize learning. Like, I can break down the neuroscience of Angry Birds or any of these games. It's super sophisticated. What is gamification? It's people who've never made games before. Like, I work with people that have made games played by hundreds of millions of people for many hundreds of hours each. The people who do gamification have never made a real game before. So what do they do? They scrape off the most shallow layer off the games industry. Oh, what's games? It's quizzes and badges. Okay? Quizzes were not fun in the second grade and they're not fun now. And badges, we didn't even invent badges in the games industry. We stole that crap from the girl Scouts. Like, that is not game design. In fact, it's funny you should say this because I actually wrote the blog I mentioned that I wrote during like the whole onboarding period. Actually, it's unrelated to the. To level one, but I wrote this blog, it's at worst game ever.org which actually describes how the experience of managing type 1 diabetes takes all the principles of how to make a fun and rewarding game and literally, one by one, flips them all on their head to make the most punishing and unforgiving giving experience ever. And you don't need a daily reward for managing your kids diabetes. You know what your daily reward is? Your kid doesn't die. Sorry if I'm being a little too.
- [19:45]
A
Well, you're fine. I mean, I know you're. It's for dramatic effect. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna step in and correct you. We're not all living on a knives edge, but we understand you are terrifying when you talk about dopamine and gaming and things like that. That's probably another podcast episode for another time. Um, when you think about all of that, how much you.
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B
It can be used for good or it can be used for evil, how.
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A
Much you do know. But to the point, and I'll, I'll try to find another word other than gamification, but this seems different.
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B
Yes.
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A
And I don't want to fluff you up too much, but it does seem different in that you. Your point here is not to take diabetes and add a layer to the experience and add more work. It's to take diabetes learning and as you say, onboarding and help make that experience easier for people. So in other words, once I know diabetes and once I'm treating my kid and I'm going, I'm not coming back to this game to say I did xyz. Check the box. Give me the badge.
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B
I do not want people playing this game every day.
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A
Okay?
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B
The purpose of this game is to sit down and take a year, what took me a year to learn. Right. And compress that to a few hours. And then maybe if you feel like you're rusty on something like, wait a minute, how do carb ratios work? Or oh, wait, Ketones how do we do that? You go, you pop back into the game, you play those levels for five minutes and you're good to go. This, you are not inputting any of your parameters. It is not live connecting to your anything. You sit down. The whole idea is to take all that learning and stress that comes from managing it over the first year, pull all that stress out, let you play through all the different scenarios super quick on your phone, compressing, you know, months into minutes. And then your brain is trained. You have. When you have to manage it day to day, you're doing it because you're more confident and you're not. Don't feel like you're guessing all the time.
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A
How did you get into all this? Were you always interested in video games?
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B
I got into video games by accident. I did animation as a hobby in high school and always wanted to work in feature film like I want to work at Pixar. And then I applied at Lucasfilm in college and got a job not in the film division, but in the games division. This was back 25 years ago. This was like when episode two was coming out. So I was hired as a cut scene anime. Literally. My first job was flying spaceships for Star wars video games.
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A
Wow.
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B
And that's when I realized, well, this is way more interesting because it's interactive now. This is way more interesting artistically, scientifically than feature film.
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A
When you say medical games. And again, I'm so far out of this field. Is this stuff that's like just on the app store that people are playing? Is it very specialized? Is it all of the above?
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B
All of the above in the app Store we have. So my company, level X makes games for doctors. We don't make games for patients. Level one is the first game we've made for patients. Okay, but what level X does we make games for doctors. We have over a million medical professionals earning continuing medical education credit toward renewing their medical licenses by playing video games in the app store. You can Google those too, if you want. There's, you know, gastro X if you want to do a colonoscopy on your phone. And so yeah, it trains doctors brains. Everything from how to do, you know, play through five lifetimes worth of rare unforeseen complications in surgery. Diagnose rare disease you might see once every 10 years. So train your brain with a reductive reasoning puzzle. That's what we do.
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A
Forgive me, but it just. It's something that I've really never heard of. Right. It's just fascinating. And I don't want to get too much off on a. On a tangent, but the idea of that, I think, is something that I don't think I'm alone in not knowing it even existed.
- [23:24]
B
Yeah. So in this idea, when we first started Level x, you know, 10 years ago, there was a. You know, we would say in the medical community, we make games for doctors. And people would raise an eyebrow. What does that mean? Games for doctors. And now in the medical community, people know. So, like, oh, yeah, games for doctors. I've heard of that. Like, I played Gastro X or Cardio X or the top derm game to train your brain how to recognize skin disease on skin of color. Da, da, da. And my goal is, we know we're successful when, let's say five years from now, you say, what do you do? You go, we make games for doctors. And they go, oh, yeah, games for doctors. Hasn't that always been a thing that. That's you. That's when you know you've won them.
- [24:00]
A
Yeah. No, it's perfect. It makes a lot of sense. I'd like a game to train me sometimes to learn my new audio editing system. Right. I mean, I have a new computer and you should. I'm. Not that you should do that, but, like, you know, you can kind of see there's applications for all this stuff.
- [24:12]
B
But that's. Anytime you need to understand a complex system, the best way to do it is to play with it. When you get a new audio system or you get a new phone, you don't go, I'm going to read the manual. Who reads the manual? They don't even come with manuals anymore. You go, I got to play with this. That's how you learn. Because humans have evolved to learn through play. And so with level one, that's what we're doing. We learn about how to manage type 1 diabetes through play. The problem is, the play is trial and error on your own kid or on yourself, which feels terrible and punishing. That's stupid. You should learn all that by playing it in a game and then not on live human beings.
- [24:47]
A
Does your daughter have a favorite part of level one?
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B
Yes. Her favorite part is there's a sequence of levels called Sneaky Snack. And so in the game, there's a whole. There's a. We're teaching about digestion because it's all about timing. It's a rhythm game. Right. You need a dose. You want to dose in advance of the food. So there's a conveyor belt. You watch dropping the food in the food digests, and there's all these gorgeous, glorious particles while this happens. So you watch the food go down the conveyor, and you want to time your insulin dose, so you're pre bolusing. It's training your brain to pre bolus. And obviously, if you're low, you got to be careful. But you learn all that from playing the game. There's a sequence of levels where all of a sudden, just randomly, a portal opens above the stomach and the food just drops in. And the second my daughter saw that, she goes, ha, I snuck that cookie. Which is something we're all. It's like, oh, I forgot to dose.
- [25:36]
A
Right.
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B
All right, what do you do? You forgot to dose. And there's a sequence of levels that you can play. Don't worry, it happens. Like, let's play through how we do this and get you back in range without crashing you later because we overdosed you. Right.
- [25:49]
A
I love it. That's great. It must be interesting for her to recognize herself in the game like that.
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B
She's not like her likeness.
- [25:56]
A
No, no, no. I didn't know.
- [25:58]
B
Oh, yes.
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A
Recognize her actions as a person with diabetes. This is something that happens to me.
- [26:03]
B
There are so many. When you play this game, there are so many little aha moments. Moments of. Or more like there's aha moments and aha moments.
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A
How are you all?
- [26:14]
B
You can only. That's the kind of thing you can only discern in a podcast.
- [26:16]
A
Yes, indeed. How are you all doing? So she's five years in. She's 10 years old.
- [26:22]
B
Oh, she's great. I mean, she's doing fantastic. We have her on, you know, DIY loop. I compile it myself. I modify the algorithm a little bit, because that's on the computer. Computer engineer. Mom's a pediatrician. She's doing great. She's playing basketball, and she's an amazing artist. And. And it's. She's really. It's really phenomenal. Like, again, as much as. As horrible as the onboarding experience was certainly throughout history, today is the best time to have type 1 diabetes.
- [26:55]
A
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
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B
The technology is great.
- [26:58]
A
Yeah. And you've got community partners here, too. You mentioned them right off the top with beyond type 1. Tell me a little bit about those partnerships.
- [27:05]
B
Beyond type 1 and breakthrough T1D. So beyond type 1 is, you know, has a huge focus on just improving the life experience and journey of patients with both type one and type two. And so this fits right into the mission, specifically, you know, around improving the whole experience around diagnosis. So this fits into what they're trying to do. This is a passion project. So they are helping promote and make sure that parents do not have to experience that and newly diagnosed people do not have to experience that onboarding process because they don't know about the game.
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A
Got it. And Same with Breakthrough T1D.
- [27:42]
B
Same with Breakthrough T1D. Breakthrough T1D also has actually a dedicated gaming group.
- [27:46]
A
Yeah.
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B
Called Breakthrough T1D Play, which is actually a bunch of executives from the video games industry who are touched by type 1 diabetes. Most of what they do is actually fundraising for breakthrough T1D in video games. But this also fits very nicely with the mission.
- [28:01]
A
Yeah, they had a link and it took me to Twitch and I was like, oh, my God, my head's gonna explode. I'm too old for this. I was like, this screen is not designed for a 53 year old woman.
- [28:09]
B
Oh, yeah. But they, they raise serious money.
- [28:11]
A
Oh yeah. It's great stuff.
- [28:12]
B
It's great stuff.
- [28:13]
A
So what is your hope here? Obviously, you want more people to use this. You want people to have this as a resource, not have to go through that one year of, you know, pulling your hair out. What do you hope happens here?
- [28:24]
B
I mean, I really, I, I want to get rid of the guilt of knowing that parents and newly diagnosed patients are going through this experience. However, as we've been going, as we've been building the game and talking to people, the importance just keeps getting amplified. So I'm here in Chicago on underserved communities on the south side of Chicago. My daughter, actually, her life expectancy is longer by virtue of having type 1 diabetes because she's going to, you know, as long as she's well managed. In certain communities, type 1 diabetes is a death sentence. Like you're on dialysis and blind in your mid-30s when people are, you know, innumerate or, you know, don't have access to good medical care, good medical education, like, it's a disaster. And so my hope is that we can, you know, this game can in some small part help at least alleviate that education and training problem. Problem and, you know, where they just don't have great access to good diabetes educators. And it's also, also rural communities. Yeah, some huge percentage, something like 50% of the type 1 diabetics in the country are managed by primary care. First off, the primary care doc should be playing the game just to. Actually, there's a lot they don't understand about managing type 1 diabetes. And then also those patients, like, how do we democratize sort of that access to Diabetes knowledge. You've got the folks that are, you know, sitting there and they, they're super users and they understand all the algorithms and they understand the insulin curves and they understand the ratios. Okay, great. How do we now take that knowledge and that mental model that's in their head and then disseminate that as broadly as we possibly can worldwide?
- [29:55]
A
I hate to ask this question on launch day, but I am curious, do you have another idea? Like, do you already have another idea for type one that you want to add on here or that you've talked to your wife about and she's like, please don't do that because you already have enough on your plate.
- [30:09]
B
So I already have a few basement projects. I have like, in my basement I have some hefty machines with hefty compute power to run all sorts of AI algorithms. So I'm actually, I have a few projects I'm working on in my basement. And again, it's all because I need it. Yeah, I mean, literally, like, one of the reasons I built this game is I don't want babysitters taking care of my kid unless they've played through level 10. So the other, other projects are mostly using AI. Every morning I have to take a photo of my daughter's lunch and with, you know, the carb count of everything written on a post it. So I'm sitting here on my phone with literally a thousand photos of school lunches. So I'm training an AI, so I just take a photo of the lunch, it tells me how many carbs it is. I don't have to weigh everything. I got another AI I'm working on to help. Like, the biggest thing we argue about here is what should the parameters be right? What should your carb ratio be at three in the afternoon? What is your insulin sensitivity factor? Should we raise basal rate? Adjust isf? We argue about this all the time and endocrine doesn't really know. And so I'm working on using AI algorithms to settle the arguments, basically, so you can just take your diabetes data, run it into an AI and it'll figure that out for you, but no promises. You know, I'm building these things because I need them. And if it gets traction, we'll, you know, do what we did with level one.
- [31:25]
A
Yeah, very interesting. I can give you a couple suggestions too. In the next five years, you need to take your AI and find the real mathematical equation for independence and balance of taking a 10 year old to like a 15, 16 year old. Get back to me. Let me just tell you. It's great. It's so much better than people say. It's all good.
- [31:48]
B
I promise so far, you know, so we're saying it's the new normal.
- [31:52]
A
It sounds great.
- [31:54]
B
I think just, you know, people should go to playlevel1.com level1 o n e spelled out go to level1 diabetes game in the App Store and just download it, play it, share it with your friends, anyone who, you know who's been touched by type 1 diabetes. It just launched. People don't know about it and they're still struggling. So the more we disseminate it, the more we can help achieve the mission of at least making the onboarding experience a little better. Excellent.
- [32:25]
A
Sam, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for doing this. I can't wait to learn more about it. I'd love to follow up with you maybe in a couple of months, see how everything went and see what else you're cooking up. Thanks for being here.
- [32:35]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [32:41]
A
More information as always in the show notes over@diabetes-connections.com Sam has also written a column for Breakthrough T1D. As you heard, he was part of the Breakthrough T1D Play Advisory Council that used to be called JDRF Game to give and he does talk about some other behind the scenes stuff there. So I will link that up in the show notes and of course I will link up the link to the App Store so you can check out the game. We are getting ready for the summer conferences over here. I am virtually attending ADA right now. That may change, but I think that's how we're going to do it this year. I will be at Friends for Life and I'm very excited to see so many of you at that amazing summer conference in Orlando in July. Yeah, that's a special weather event as always, but I get to see a lot of familiar faces and meet a lot of new people as well. It's a superhero theme this year, so I'm figuring out my booth. It's going to be a lot of fun. Thank you to my editor, John Buchenis from Audio Editing Solutions. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Stacey Sims. See you back here soon. Until then, be kind to yourself. Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Sims Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged.