A Digital Therapy for Diabetes Prevention Among Overweight Adults in Terengganu, Malaysia

Summary

The modern world revolves around technology; unsurprisingly companies are leveraging the expertise of the digital tech industry to aid in the prevention of chronic diseases. Among one of the most common chronic diseases in Malaysia is diabetes. Prevalence of diabetes in Malaysia has increased by more than two folds over the past two decades. Despite a growing number of tech products developments on diabetes prevention, a recent meta-analysis has found almost no evidence on digital therapy outside the developed world. Therefore, this study is needed to demonstrate the potential of digital therapy in preventing diabetes in Malaysia. The study design is a randomized controlled trial study conducted in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia. The study will be conducted in two phases. The first phase will involve preparation of intervention modules and development of intervention mobile app. The second phase will involve validation and utilization of the digital therapy. We hope that this digital therapy program can make a significant difference in health outcomes, especially for diabetes. By giving precise regimes and daily monitoring, digital therapeutics can offer mountains of data that can potentially provide doctors unprecedented insights into patient behavior and create feedback or optimization loops for individual patients. Enabling patients to take greater control over managing their chronic illnesses and preventing disease progression could save billions of ringgits throughout the entire Malaysia healthcare system. By that, we hope this approach can be considered as a scalable solution to address national diabetes prevention efforts to target of improvement on diabetes prevalence to not more than 15% by 2025 and serve as a model for applying such services to other chronic diseases.

Conditions

• Pre Diabetes
• Overweight and Obesity

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

MyDiPP (Malaysia Diabetes Prevention Program)

The participants will go through 16-weekly core lessons that need to be completed within the first 24 weeks after randomisation focusing on changing dietary habits, increase physical activity and relapse prevention and 6-monthly post-core lessons focusing on maintenance of lifestyle habits and weight loss achieved during the core program.

OTHER

usual care

standard health education from primary care providers in the clinic

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Sharifah Wajihah Wafa T Syed Saadun Tarek Wafa, PhD · Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

65 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2019-09-01

Primary Completion

2020-05-01

Completion

2021-07-01

Countries

• Malaysia

Study Locations