Dynamic Interactive Educational Diabetes Simulations Using the World Wide Web: An Experience of More Than 15 Years with AIDA Online

Figure 1

Basic structure of AIDA online. HTML = HyperText Markup Language. The AIDA online homepage (http://www.2aida.net) presents the user with various simulator options and case scenarios. A series of dedicated (Common Gateway Interface) cgi-bin scripts written in Perl v5.0 are used to read case scenario data and insulin and carbohydrate profiles from various databases. The plasma insulin and blood glucose (BG) profiles are computed using a further Perl script which contains the AIDA v4 model differential equations (and which makes use of some temporary storage space on the AIDA online server) [11]. Output from the simulator is returned to the user in HTML format for display by a web browser.