Interactive educational diabetes simulators: future possibilities.

In 1996 an interactive educational diabetes simulator called AIDA was released without charge on the Internet as a non-commercial contribution to continuing diabetes education. Over the past 3 years over 30,000 people have visited the AIDA Web site-- http://www.diabetic.org.uk/aida.htm--and over 10,000 copies of the program have been downloaded from there free-of-charge. This review builds on the experience gained from the AIDA development and the World Wide Web distribution of the software, and looks to the future, highlighting features which users might expect to see in future generations of such interactive educational diabetes programs. Novel functions already described in the literature are overviewed, and possible applications using personal computers and the Internet are discussed. The importance of the user interface is stressed. The concept of a "virtual diabetic patient" that provides an electronic representation of a patient with diabetes--and which can be used for self-learning/teaching/demonstration purposes--is highlighted.