Yesterday, my three-year-old son was diagnosed with diabetes. I’ve been trying to think about what to write for this blog post to keep it somewhat relevant to this class or my post-bac journey and it got me thinking about the technology that I’ve suddenly found myself relying on. Not the fancy equipment, like glucose monitors or insulin pumps, but the apps that were targeted to one particular audience that now may be used by an entirely different group of people for reasons that the application authors might not have expected.

Specifically, I’m thinking of nutrition apps. I’m finding out real quick that with diabetes, it’s all about the carbs. Every meal is now a math problem: figure out the carbs about to be consumed, account for current glucose levels, and administer the insulin needed to handle the incoming sugars. How do we find the carbohydrate content of the food? Food labels are the first source to check and after that, it’s apps and the web.

Suddenly, there is a different weight to the numbers being read from a nutrition app. Those numbers are now a primary driver for the amount of hormone we’re about to inject into a child. How much do we trust those numbers? How do they compare to other sites or apps? How do I tell a medium apple from a large one? It makes me think about the various ways any particular application is used, and whether that use is in line with the developer’s expectations. Your intended audience may drastically change the standards to which you hold yourself.

I’m sure there are all kinds of great ethical questions that we could discuss here about developing software for millions of people, but I’m not going there. I just hope some data entry intern didn’t fat-finger the carb count for dino bites!