PEOPLE with chronic medical conditions often find the tedium or discomfort of treatment more unpleasant than the disease. Now a medical student has proposed a way of making medical compliance less burdensome: why not turn it into a computer game?

This summer Vikram Sheel Kumar, a student at Harvard University and M.I.T.'s joint Division of Health Sciences and Technology, plans to begin a clinical trial of DiaBetNet, a program in which diabetics ages 13 to 15 will use hand-held computers and specially designed software in a competition to guess their glucose levels. The goal is to inspire the children to follow proper medical procedures.

Conceived and designed by Mr. Kumar and his faculty adviser, Prof. Alex Pentland of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which is financing the project, DiaBetNet relies on the human urge to win. Just as children play arcade games over and over hoping to get the highest score, Mr. Kumar and Professor Pentland hope the participants will be eager to increase their DiaBetNet scores.

"They'll play the game and they'll say, `Hey, I got that right!' " Mr. Kumar said. "This way, there will be something to look forward to."

Patients with Type 1 diabetes lack the insulin they need to help their cells take in glucose from the bloodstream. A large meal can lead to an excess of sugar in their blood, while heavy exercise after an insulin injection can result in low blood sugar. Dangerous medical complications can result from either. It takes a mix of meal planning, exercise and insulin injections to keep Type 1 diabetics properly regulated.

Diabetics must check their glucose levels several times a day by analyzing a drop of blood from a fingerprick so that they can set their insulin dosage accurately. It is tempting for a child to skip the test and hope that the standard dose will do.

DiaBetNet is designed not only to encourage children to check their glucose levels but also to teach them how food and exercise affect glucose, and to use that knowledge to win.

The children must must wear a wireless accelerometer that determines how much they exercise by measuring their vertical motion. Each child will also carry a blood glucose meter that will plug into the serial port of a Handspring Visor Platinum hand-held computer. When a drop of blood is fed into the meter, the reading will be sent wirelessly through the Handspring to a computer at the media lab.

For the first three blood tests of each day, the glucose level appears on the hand-held device as a number. The daily guessing game begins later when, rather than showing the number reported by the glucose meter, the Handspring displays a graph summarizing the child's physical activity, carbohydrate level and prior glucose data for the day. The more accurately the child then predicts the glucose level, the higher the score. To score, the child must register a glucose level within his or her target range, so that no unsafe but correctly predicted result is rewarded.

It is even possible to challenge other members of the project on the Internet through the Handspring. Two children can study each another's statistics and compete at guessing each other's glucose level.

A game involving blood tests and meters may sound too tedious to be successful. But the abundance of children who have mastered Pokémon play on their Game Boys, researchers say, suggests that children will struggle to absorb anything they find interesting. Narcissism may also work to DiaBetNet's advantage, since people tend to find themselves inherently intriguing.

DiaBetNet aims to create a diabetic community for children in which they both cooperate and compete. Grouped into teams of four with a rotating captain who can get a higher score by persuading everyone on his team to play, the children get points not only for predicting their own and others' glucose levels but also for offering useful advice on strategy. Data for every player will be available on a DiaBetNet Web site, as well as rankings of the top players and teams.

Mr. Kumar said he hoped that a stream of advice and sympathy would rally children when they find their scores dropping. "We're hoping the community will normalize times when the step back seems worse than the step forward," he said.

He suggested that people in general, not just children, would be more likely to take medicine properly if they could see the results instantly. If initial trials are successful, DiaBetNet could lead to programs for other people who need to take special care of themselves.

Mr. Kumar's next project is a wireless game for manic-depressives called HiRoller, although he has not yet come up with a quantifiable measure for a person's mental state. Perhaps the future of personal health maintenance over all will hinge not only on medication but on software as well.