After his daughter’s diagnosis, this dad built an app to help others manage diabetes

(CNN) — When Sam Glassenberg’s 5-year-old daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, the veteran video game developer found himself facing a terrifying new reality: Becoming his child’s stand-in “pancreas,” making life-or-death insulin decisions with only “confusing” instructions to guide him.

“Basically, on Friday, your life is normal,” Glassenberg told CNN. “And then on Saturday, you’re responsible for injecting precisely calculated doses of a lethal drug, insulin, into your kid — and if you get it wrong, she falls into a coma.”

After his daughter spent two days in the hospital in 2019, Glassenberg said he was given a sheet of paper by the medical team with crossed out carbohydrate-to-insulin ratios, rounding rules, and correction factors. He calls it “your guide to not killing your own kid.”

Even as a Stanford-trained computer science engineer, Glassenberg found it confusing and frustrating, especially with the high stakes involved.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s horrible because for those first few months, you’re learning through play, but that play is trial-and-error on your own kid.”

So, he did what game designers do best. He built a video game — called “Level One: A Diabetes Game” — a free mobile app that has had about 50,000 downloads since its launch last April.

The game has the look and feel of the popular “Candy Crush Saga” app, but it turns the complex science of diabetes management into an intuitive interactive game that teaches people how insulin, food, and blood sugar interact with the body.

The goal is to help children and their caregivers feel less overwhelmed after diagnosis. The game has 60 levels to help people better understand diabetes concepts and introduces new ones as the player advances through the levels.

“It trains your brain how to manage Type 1 diabetes,” Glassenberg said. “Everything you need to know; how to dose insulin, how to count carbs, how to manage ketones (chemicals produced by the liver when the body lacks blood sugar), how to deal with lows.”

More than 200 reviewers in the Apple app store have weighed in, giving it 4.9 stars out of 5. The game was launched in partnership with leading diabetes organizations Beyond Type 1 and Breakthrough T1D Play.

“I’ve had Type 1 for 15 years, downloaded this game thinking it was going to be another one of those completely inaccurate silly games that just make everything more confusing,” said one reviewer. “But it would definitely be helpful as a new diabetic.”

Another added, “I love this game sooo much! I’m a Type 1 diabetic, and this game has helped me understand more!”

A challenge by his father

Glassenberg spent much of his career building teams that developed video games based on popular movies, from “The Hunger Games” to “Mission: Impossible.” He had started at LucasArts working on “Star Wars” games.

As the head of the DirectX team at Microsoft, Glassenberg accepted a Technical Emmy in 2006 on behalf of his team for pushing the state of the art in interactive entertainment.

Glassenberg hails from a long line of doctors, including his grandfather, mother, father, aunts, uncles. When he excitedly called his father, an anesthesiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, after winning the Emmy, his dad responded with: “That’s very nice. But in this family, we only recognize Nobel Prizes.”

His father held out hope that his son would go to medical school and stop toying with games. Glassenberg plowed ahead, building the top independent game publisher in Hollywood.

Then, in 2012, his father called him with a challenge. His dad wanted a visual guide to help instruct doctors on how to properly insert a tube with a camera into the windpipe to maintain an open airway, a technique called fiber-optic intubation.

“Put all this video game nonsense to good use,” Glassenberg recalled his father saying. “Make me a game to train my colleagues to do a fiber-optic intubation. It’s a tricky procedure. We only do it on difficult patients.”

For three weekends, Glassenberg spent extra hours building what he called “this crappy little game for my dad.” He then uploaded it to the app store.

“I’m busy running this big independent Hollywood game studio,” he said. “I don’t think about it again.”

Within two years, the iLarynx app had been downloaded more than 100,000 times. Hospitals around the world had been using it to help doctors and found it was substantially improving physician performance.

Glassenberg’s challenge to others

A spark was created. From there, Glassenberg thought: What if I brought together the top video game developers, designers, and artists who had worked on everything from “Mortal Kombat” to “Diner Dash” and teamed them up with top physician advisers and hospital groups?

He formed the medical gaming company Level Ex with a mission “to revolutionize the way physicians stay sharp in their specialties, leveraging advanced video game technology and proven cognitive neuroscience to recreate the thrills and challenges of practicing medicine.” It has been named multiple times by Fast Company as one of the “World’s Most Innovative” companies, most recently in 2023.

Level Ex has since been acquired by Relevate Health. Glassenberg now serves as the executive vice president of Relevate Health Games.

More than 1 million medical professionals, according to the company, have utilized the games across various specialties, helping them collaborate in diagnosing patients and working to improve patient outcomes.

The diabetes app was its first game designed specifically to help patients and caregivers. “By playing a video game for an hour and a half,” Glassenberg said, “you can master Type 1 Diabetes management.”

His middle daughter is now 11 years old and “doing awesome.” Glassenberg said his father is proud of him, even if he shirked medical school.

What was it like to take his daughter’s diagnosis and figure out a way to help the entire diabetes’ community?

“It’s extremely rewarding and meaningful,” he said, “but also a little frustrating.” Glassenberg said he wished he had developed the app sooner so more people could’ve already benefited, especially those in underserved communities where access to care and learning about diabetes management is scarce.

At the recent game-developer conference, the GDC Festival of Gaming convention in San Francisco, Glassenberg challenged his fellow game designers to be “my competition.”

“I can’t build games for every single medical condition,” he told CNN. “When you look at health care, you think, ‘Well, if we could just get people from the games industry to go and solve these problems, how much better the patient experience would be?’”

He’s excited to see who takes him up on becoming his next rival.