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Type I diabetic here. Assuming current tech stays where it is (not saying it will), this could easily tack 10 years on to my lifespan. For many who watch their
by morganherlocker 13y ago
Type I diabetic here. Assuming current tech stays where it is (not saying it will), this could easily tack 10 years on to my lifespan. For many who watch their diabetes less closely (something I cannot fault anyone for), this could add 20-30 years.
For anyone who does not know, type I diabetes is not something you can just follow a doctor's direction on and be ok. Even if you follow your doctor perfectly, there can still be serious complications, and type I diabetics with the best control are actually more likely to die from severe low blood sugars.
The reason for this is that the optimum blood glucose level is around 100. <70 and you start to be severely mentally impaired, making it difficult at times to seek treatment (finding and eating sugar, in a nutshell). On the flip side, if you are lax on insulin, your blood sugar might hover around 250 for months, and you will feel close to normal. Having a blood glucose this high on a long term basis will have long term effects that are what kill most diabetics in the long run. A low blood sugar, however, can be fatal within minutes to hours.
Either way, a continuous feedback mechanism would help tight control diabetics, and diabetics who do the minimum. Tight controllers could get faster feedback about when they are going into the serious danger zone without having to initiate any action (checking blood sugar), and lax diabetics would get a constant reminder of how they are letting there life slip away (which they normally would rarely see, since they hardly ever check their blood sugar anyway).
I have to say though, I am still a bit skeptical for a few reasons:
- One, I have been told about this sort of miracle technology ever since I was diagnosed 15 years ago.
- Two, the medical complex locks down their tech and extracts the maximum value out. There is not a single glucose device on the market that lets you extract the data out of your glucose monitor and crunch the data how you want. I have worked on hacking these devices to extract data and the legal verbiage around these activities has strongly discouraged me from releasing anything. Previous continuous glucose monitoring systems. These companies would prefer you rot in the dark, than to lose one bit of profit.
- Three, if one of these devices is not 100% perfect, it gets shot down and banned from the market. This is probably a combination of profit-motivated industry and caution-motivated government. A great example of this is a continuous glucose monitoring, non-invasive watch that came out ~ a decade ago. It was on the market for several years, before being banned. I, like just about every person in the thread I linked, would pay $10k+ for one of these, despite the reduced accuracy over traditional devices. Entrepreneurs in the health industry take note.
[1] [http://www.diabetesdaily.com/forum/testing-blood-sugar/61908-glucose-watch/ http://www.diabetesdaily.com/forum/testing-blood-sugar/61908...]
- joeconway 13y agoYou may be interested to know that Bayer's Contour USB allows you to pull the information off in an SQLite DB http://www.bayerdiabetes.co.uk/sections/products-for-my-diabetes/meters/bayer-contour-next-usb-meter/Overview http://www.bayerdiabetes.co.uk/sections/products-for-my-diab...
- morganherlocker 13y agoAlmost all meters allow you to extract data over USB, but the data usually comes out in an obfuscated proprietary format. Do you know which format this exports to? Scott Hanselman had a blog post about this a few years ago (can't seem to find the link). IMO, every meter should be required to export to CSV at a bare minimum. I will look into the one you linked, but for most users, they really need something that can be easily converted to an xls. The current state of things is that they only export to some supremely terrible proprietary program that is really only meant for an endocrinologist to use with the help of an IT team. I should be able to easily view my health data and crunch it how I see fit. Decent analytics around my glucose data would be extremely valuable, but the current state of affairs is abysmal.
- joeconway 13y agoI really feel your pain. The reason why I love this meter so much is that it doesn't require a £50 USB cable (The usb is built into the meter) the proprietry software is a standalone jar on the USB device which is amazingly quite good. But best of all when you plug the USB device in it mounts as removable storage with a db.sqlite file which is easily accessible and a simple .dump reveals the sensible DB schema. It's really refreshing to be able to get my data and do what I want with it.
- morganherlocker 13y agoThanks for the tip. I will buy this and try it out, open sourcing any scripts I can write that will assist in the extraction. Do you know of any existing tools?