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 4+ years over 74,000 people have visited the AIDA Web pages at http://www.2aida.org and over 20,000 copies of the program have been downloaded from there free-of-charge. This article builds on the experience gained from the AIDA development, and the World Wide Web distribution of the software, and highlights some of the problems which users have reported with the program. An updated release of the software (AIDA v4.3) is described and the method applied for modelling glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c) levels within this new version of AIDA is documented. An overview is provided of the trialling and beta-testing of this latest release of the program, and the general 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.

Keywords: Computers, diabetes education, audit, interactive simulation, glycosylated haemoglobin, HbA1c, diabetes