http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ACallForGoodDesignOneGuyAnInsulinPump8PDAsAndAnIPod.aspx

Basically it is amazing that glucose monitors are so antique and difficult to use and that the vendors lack any type of interest in opening up the protocols so people can at least get the data out of them to improve their health.

I just listened to this amazing pod cast from Scott Hanselman on Diabetes. Scott has been a diabetic for almost 10 years and he has capability to explain what it is in easy to understand words. He also talks about the technology improvements that are happening today and that are in the pipleline that will make diabetes more manageable.

As you can imagine I am now very interesting in using software to help our family deal with Diabetes. I have been using some software but the experience is absolutely mediocre. So let's write down some requirements that this software should meet:

 Needs to read from multiple types of meters from multiple vendors.
people often buy meters over time and based on recommendations of physicians and web message boards that discuss the latest and greatest

1. You need to be able to get the data into your software wether you are online or offline (e.g. traveling).
2. It needs to be able to authenticate multiple people who enter the data
   e.g. patient, parents, school nurse, nanny, temporary care taker, diabetes nurse
3. The software needs to be able to deal with different roles
   e.g. data entry only, report only, all
4. software be able to load, categorize and process the data with minimum user input
   the patient or caretaker have already enough other things to do so they are not interested in spending 30 minutes in organizing the data.
5. The software needs to highlight and optionally prompt for missing data.
6. It needs extensive graphing capabilities.
   especially graphs that show the regular measurements such as before breakfast, before lunch, bed time etc.
   the graphs need to be able to filter out extra measurements, e.g. from a sporting event or create separate charts for those.
   graphs need to show out of range data.
7. The software needs to identify and reports trends
   e.g. you are trending lower and lower for your before breakfast blood glucose level.
8. Backup/restore needs to be easy.
9. It needs to be able to import/export data
   so you can load from existing spreadsheets or other software systems

 Please let me know if you have more requirements as I would love to hear them.

In case you were wondering why it had been quiet here for a the last few weeks.... We had to deal with a family emergency that took a lot of time and energy. All is organized now but it will refresh my inspiration to write about technology in Health Care, especially when it comes to diabetes.

My wife has posted some more background on her blog.

As a result I tried some software that comes with a Blood Sugar meter and it was really, really, really bad. I wrote an article on it that I cannot post as it has too much frustration in it. I will contact the manufacturer and see if I can get a response from them before complaining in public.