The Colorful Kit Helping Diabetic Kids Manage Their Injections With Temporary Tattoos

No kid looks forward to getting their shots, but for children living with type 1 diabetes, insulin injections are a part of everyday life. When Renata Souza Luque, a graduate from the Parsons School of Design in New York, saw how much of a toll the routine was taking on her 7-year-old cousin Thomas, she designed a product to make the process a little easier for kids like him. The result, Thomy, is a tool kit that aims to make insulin injections less intimidating to young diabetics, as Dezeen reports.

The brightly colored, easy-to-carry kit is designed for ages 4 and up, with an insulin pen specifically made to fit in a child’s hand. In addition to being easier for kids to hold and use, the Thomy pen is designed to be more fun than your average insulin injector. It has a thermochromic release valve, so that when it touches the patient’s skin, it begins to change color. The color-morphing doesn’t serve any medical purpose, but it provides kids with a distraction as they’re receiving the injection.

The kit also includes playful temporary tattoos to help kids figure out where their injections should go. Diabetics need to change the site of their injections regularly to prevent lumps of fat from developing under the skin, and for patients injecting themselves multiple times a day, keeping track of specific spots can be difficult. Kids can apply one of Thomy's temporary tattoos over their injection sites as a map for their shots. Each time they need an injection, they wipe off one of the tattoo's colored dots with alcohol and insert the needle in its place. When all the dots are gone, it's time to move on to a new area of the skin.

Souza Luque originally created Thomy for her senior capstone project, and last year it was named a national finalist at the James Dyson Awards. Most recently, she presented the concept at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town in late February.