If you need an example of Gillette’s razor blade business plan, don’t look at razors; a five pack of the latest multi-blade, aloe-coated wonder shaver is still only about $20. Look a glucose meters. Glucose meters all do the same thing – test blood glucose levels – but are imminently proprietary, FDA regulated, and subsidized by health insurance. It’s a perfect storm of vendor lock-in that would make King Gillette blush.
For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Tom] is building what was, until now, only a dream. It’s a universal glucometer that uses any test strip. The idea, of course, is to buy the cheapest test strip while giving the one-fingered salute to the companies who release more models of glucometers in a year than Apple does phones.
As with any piece of consumer electronics, there are plenty of application guides published by the biggest semiconductor companies explaining to engineers how to use their part to build a device. After reviewing the literature from TI, Maxim, Freescale, and Microchip, and a few research articles on the same subject, [Tom] has a pretty good idea how to build a glucometer.
The trick now is figuring out how to build an adapter for every make and model of test strip. This is more difficult than it sounds, because some test strips have two contacts, some have three, some have five, and all of them are proprietary. Calibration will be an issue, but if you’re building a glucometer from scratch, that’s not a very big problem.
This is one of the most impressive projects we’ve seen in this year’s Hackaday Prize. No, it shouldn’t be the only way a diabetic tracks their sugar levels, but diabetics shouldn’t rely only on test strips anyway. If you’re looking for a Hackaday Prize project that has the potential to upend an industry, this is the one.
Even if he can utilize some of the 2 or 3 terminal strips on the market that would be a huge step in the right direction. The house branded testers are getting cheaper. I am currently trying to communicate with my meter without buying the $50 download cable, which is really just a USB to serial cable and a 2.5mm connector on the meter end.
Hi Eugene,
We have already build this and our design is open as well http://www.diabe.to
Thanks,
Shreek
@Shreekant, You are reading the data out of the data port of the various glucometers using a single hardware. We still need the glucometer and have to buy the strips. In this project he is trying to read different strips in a single hardware.
How about an adapter . like with an sd card u put it in an adapter case to fit.your computer port. Same.concept same programming. The ability to rotate and accept codes in a random order.
A friend of mine diabetic had pretty much controlled her diabetes type 2 with a proper low-carbs diet.
She used to inject insulin and pop glucophage pills.
Yet, she kept monitoring herself.
One day, her blood glucose shot up dramatically. She injected insulin and felt really bad.
She kept monitoring her blood sugar level, and they came not down to normal.
She was tempted to inject again, but owing to her long experience, and how bad she felt, she decided not to. Instead, she drove to the emergency. They took her blood sugar there, and she was at 3.5mmol, i.e. at the threshold of diabetic coma due to too low blood sugar. She had brought her glucometer, and the did side by side tests. The glucometer took a fancy of showing a 17+ mmol positive offset.
Had she followed the machine, and re-injected, she would have died from insulin-induced hypoglycemia.
I don’t know how stringent she was on her calibration, but one thing sure, the machine went crazy quite suddenly and there is no garantee that regular calibration would have caught the problem. It was not minor drift, it was a factor 20+ offset compared to regular precision and resolution.
Glucometers do not only carry the cost of development, and of crony rent-seeking capitalism, they also must purchase the potentially billion-dollar insurance coverage resulting from a massive lawsuit.
You’d argue that this is also the fault of crony legal profession, but then, one new glucometer design will not fix that problem.
I wish you best of luck, the idea is great. A greater idea would be to develop a completely open-source glucometer, including the strips, with possibly a re-usable optical analyser. But then, the powerful pharmas won’t like you, and they’re reputedly not choirboys.
Medical devices can be tricky like that, and medical staff can make the same mistake of following them blindly too. I had one son on oxygen etc. because they had a bad oxy pulse meter on him. It was showing an anomaly which I pointed out to the staff but they ignored me so I demanded they take him off the oxygen and then test him with another device, he was fine. They never did fully admit their error or refund me the thousands of extra dollars that level of care cost me. All they needed to do was cross check the results with another device if they were not certain. The lesson there is always trust your intuition if you can back it up with a logical method of testing your hypothesis, and do not trust “experts” if they are being arrogant and ignoring facts that are right in front of them.
Would you trust your life to an open source hobby project?
If it was my project sure, or I guess as long as I fully understood it.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. What chance is there that you do understand the biochemistry of humans and the different chemistry of each individual product’s strips?
“giving the one-fingered salute to the companies who release more models of glucometers in a year than Apple does phones.”
So… one, then?
In the UK the meters are always free now and the strips are paid for by the NHS.
No one even considers the price at all.
I’m a type 1 diabetic in the UK, and I have friends in the US who have a diabetic parent. As an ex USAF serviceman, his pension appears to cover the test strips he uses.
Now sometimes I forget to order new strips from the docs and have to buy my own. 50 Accu-Check strips in the UK cost about £24.99 (about $33.49) over the counter. Compare this with Walmart price of $89.99 and you can see in an instant why this is an important development.
+1
In the US, Medicare covers diabetic supplies too. I believe you are eligible for Medicare when you hit retirement age.
Am I understanding that right? Walmart in the US charge four times the over the counter price in the UK. That seems ludicrous if that’s what it is saying.
3 times
“No one even considers the price at all.”
That’s actually one of the common arguments against national health care, that it would actually drive costs up because the users do not consider the cost to the system when making decisions.
The only problem with that argument is… reality. In this case it is stated the strips cost double in the US system. My taxes used for the NHS are less than half of the insurance costs in the US – and I don’t have to worry about “insurance company death squads”[1] denying me cover or putting my premiums up by a factor of 10 [2]
[1] the insurance company shills regularly trot out “government death squads” innuendos and lies.
[2] standard operating practice for financially ring-fenced insurance plans: when all the still-healthy people have transferred to different plans, the sick people left behind still have to self-finance their medical costs
I have to agree here, If you look up healthcare costs worldwide USA is ranked number 1. Yet when it comes to healthcare USA is ranked really low in terms of best care. I live in the UK and I love the fact that if I get sick I don’t need to worry about paying for it because I already have. I don’t know what you get told in US about our health care system but if you asked nearly anyone rich or poor in Britain if they would like to change healthcare to an American system they would say now (with a few exceptions and I mean a few).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/images/publications/fund-report/2014/june/davis_mirror_intl_ig_rev_616.jpg?la=en
“Calibration will be an issue, but if you’re building a glucometer from scratch, that’s not a very big problem.”
That is indeed trivial compared with the *real* problem: buying (or even getting) corporate/product insurance cover.
Don’t forget that – even if the device works perfectly – people will die, and lawyers will rub their hands with glee.
“Glucose meters all do the same thing – test blood glucose levels – but are imminently proprietary, FDA regulated, and subsidized by health insurance. It’s a perfect storm of vendor lock-in that would make King Gillette blush.”
yet they say never rely on the home test as a substitute for the a1c test
“diabetics shouldn’t rely only on test strips anyway”
What else are they going to use? Continuous glucose monitors aren’t all that precise, you might see a 50mg/dL difference from between a CGM and glucometer, and that’s very significant. Diabetics do truly rely on them to make decisions, so it’s vital that they are accurate.
They rely on regular A1C testing, that’s what!
Well if you are a fragile diabetic, good luck with relying on regular A1C alone.
Regular daily testing is the only way to keep healthy and minimises the chance of dying from hypoglycemia. I’ve been dropping piss into test tubes with an eye dropper, peeing on plastic strips and lancing my fingers for the best part of 40+ years and the current equipment is the best I’ve ever seen.
I’m lucky to have an insulin pump, and it, combined with regular blood tests has changed my life. Just need to close the loop between the two……
Regular A1C testing doesn’t help you much when you are Type 1 (i.e.now insulin production, not insulin resistent). Test strips or, if you are incredibly lucky a CGM (many insurance companies in the US won’t cover them unless you are considered “out of control” and even then you need an exception as they consider CGMs “experimental”) is the only way to stay alive. You have to test multiple times a day with a test strip, even with a CGM.
The A1C will mainly tell you how well you managed to regulate your blood sugar over time but does nothing to keep you alive day to day. You need accurate test strips for that.
A1C does not show short term spikes.
Exactly and in this context “short term” is less than 3 months.
Hello there, as an engineer that wrote the firmware for one of those meters, this project is a HUGE mistake. Your fundamental assumption is incorrect. That assumption being that all strips are the same, just with different contacts. Trust me, that is the very small tip of an incredibly huge iceberg. The strip material and chemistry is different for every brand. Years of R&D with dozens of scientists go into figuring out how to reliably measure glucose levels. Do you seriously think you can reverse engineer the algorithms for each strip type and generate a glucose value reliably? We always put customer safety first, implementing literally hundreds of safety protocols and interlocks. This project is reckless and most likely illegal. What happens when someone dies from this? Their deaths will be on your hands.
Why do you think that you can just bypass the FDA? Fun fact: the FDA can put you in JAIL. The couple of dollars you saved on strips will probably seem insignificant when the lawyers get involved.
all meters trace their history to ever more primitive meters, were they illegal? did they use today’s complicated (and more accurate) equations and algorithms? sure it is irresponsible not to use the most accurate knowledge in a healthcare device… but so is stockpiling scientific advances behind pay-walls, and more crucially so is considering the information of exact conditions of each meter fault event (throughout history that fed back, correcting algorithms) and user statistics the property of the companies, where the patients/victims ought to be considered at least co-authors of this data… and a well informed patient could choose to put this in the public domain (anonymized etc)
similarly to your argument it could be argued that it is a huge mistake that different companies use their proprietary methods, instead of openly sharing data/algorithms/equations to make the best device possible… and I kind of agree to that extent!
also, in most countries laws require informed consent from the patient to undergo medical treatments.
how can one truly speak of informed consent if the exact method of measurement (the diagnosis the meter makes) is not only not understood, but actively kept secret from patients? some day proprietary medical devices could be considered illegal, and companies retro-actively held liable for fault-events…
In the USA for some classes of medical devices scientific data must be submitted to the FDA and they must approve the device before it can be sold. I expect similar processes and regulations exist in all first world countries.
that would be an added requirement, and does not yet constitute informed consent by the patient…
a thief paying taxes on his income as required, does not legalize his thieving…
OK what then is the legal definition of “Informed consent” if you seriously believe you have a point of law? And in what jurisdiction are you intending to apply it in?
As far as I know, no legal systems currently formulate a definition of “informed consent”, but they use the same phrase for “informed consent” in both medical cases (malpractice of advice/treatment claim) on one hand and potential rape cases (rape claim) in the other.
Since usage of an identical phrase in both contexts is observed systematically in different legal systems in different nations with different languages, according to _comparative law_ principles they can be considered to carry identical semantics. Hence I will compare 2 hypothetical events that differ only in claim type [malpractice / rape] with malpractice in the left side, and rape in the right side:
A young (sexually unexperienced) diabetic girl was inappropriately advised by her faulty glucometer to [“urgently inject insulin” / “urgently insert a banana up her rectum”] when urgent action of another type was necessary instead. Alarmed and intimidated by the potential loss of life or limb the girl complied.
As her conditions worsened she was brought to the hospital, and eventually after recovering the parents prosecute the manufacturers of the glucometer with a [malpractice / rape] claim. In court the issue question of “informed consent” pops up.
So given that the cases differ only in claim type, and given that the semantics of “informed consent” are most probably identical in both types of cases (due to the comparative law observation) we are forced to acknowledge that either both cases involve “informed consent” or both cases involve lack of “informed consent”.
I say lack of informed consent. But your are entitled to your own opinion of course…
After that bizarre comment my opinion is that you “ludwig” are a paedophile and that you should be reported as such.
@Dan
Let me make sure I understand you correctly:
I illustrate with legal principles how dangerously close holding back information of a medical device comes to ensuring a lack of “informed consent” and hence how dangerously close it comes to rape…
And then you conclude that _I_ am the pedophile?
Take a look in the mirror…
Your choices say nothing about myself, but they speak volumes about the sort of paraphilic fantasies you indulge in. You betrayed yourself therefore you are a fool as well as a deviant. For one a minor cannot give informed consent, QED you are a fool and a deviant.
@Dan, what’s next? when priests abuse children, and atheists point it out…. the atheists must have been responsible?
“The priests” are you, in that they are your thoughts and ideas therefore you are a deviant. It isn’t complicated, the only person creating the inappropriate and invalid scenario was you. All you did is let us all see into your mind and you proved nothing about anyone else.
Crap I first posted this replay in the wrong thread…
“For one a minor cannot give informed consent”
I _fully_ agree that a minor cannot give informed consent, at least we agree there!
I never said the “young (sexually inexperienced) girl” in the hypothetical example was a minor.
I for example still lived with my parents at age 21/22 when I was still sexually inexperienced and enjoyed a fantastic (first) consensual intercourse, with an absolutely adorable girl only one year younger than me…
I will not however sink to your low “ad hominem” level, and apply your method of reasoning on your creative imagination of declaring the girl a minor…
Also, if you want to read the condensed crazy story of my life (I suspect it’s too long to post as a reply in the thread), I can ask Brian to forward my story without forwarding my email, so that we don’t get to know each other’s email address.
you would much better understand all my previously expressed viewpoints, I assure you they make perfect rational sense to me, or anyone who would read my story…
LOL, yeah sure pedobear like we all want to get to know you, not.
nah, pedobear is all the parents, doctors and surgeons who force circumcision on minor boys (like I was)
Nobody here is interested in your problems Mr Pedobear, perhaps you have a project to share that we could talk about, other that your potentially criminal activities that is.
I will just ignore your wild accusations… but about the “potential illegality” of “my activities”: would you consider those of Edmond Dantes (the “count of Monte-Cristo”) illegal? because I could use some “partners in crime” to take sweet revenge and take down the ancien regime in the process…
As far as projects go, I must admit I am shy (or perfectionist, so not too quick to show a result), slow (because very ambitious, and also juggling and alternating between multiple projects) and inefficient (easily distracted with my psychological problems). That said I can describe a project I have in mind, but not my highest priority:
Brain activity modulates phase of 100MHz amplitude modulated infrared light (FNIRS, EROS, …). So with optical I/Q demodulator it should be possible to get such a signal. Wait, there’s devices that consist of whole arrays of optical I/Q demodulators (Kinect for Xbox One). Some of the available I/Q demod camera sensors specify 100MHz as upper limit. I do not know but assume the sensitivity will not be high enough (unless increasing the intensity of the laser/led, but take care not to exceed allowed optical power limits).
Basically, get this specific Kinect, and its adapter for computers, try to get the opensource driver running, verify its functioning as a regular depth camera, check wavelength of IR diode, else replace with a laser/led with correct wavelength to pass the skull. Then get a whole 2D array of phases representing brain signals…
I know, why don’t you replicate the work of that guy that was growing meat in a laboratory, then you can grow yourself a new foreskin and stop crying to strangers about missing it. My brother in law is a surgeon, he can sew it on for you, in the case you are not man enough to DIY that too. Chuck Norris would sew it back on himself.
@PurpleTurdBracket
I did not loose my foreskin, at age 10 or 11 against my will I underwent ‘partial’ circumcision (making a few lengthwise cuts, then sewing the cuts together in the orthogonal direction, to “widen” the foreskin). except it resulted in infibulation (what slaves underwent, not _that_ long ago, incidentally this is also the origin of circumcision, to undo infibulation, or to prevent a person from becoming a slave -at least decreasing the probability- as buyers preferred slaves that could be infibulated… countrary to popular belief this has little to do with religion at all, except the belief in free citizens and slaves, explicit slavery has been abolished for a while now, but the habit continues)
Later I discovered a series of papers, written before I was even born, demonstrating how topical steroids (growth hormone) & stretching can be used to treat phimosis…
During this time I developed a potentially paranoid thought system that the urologists don’t talk about this option because the cream/ointment is cheap, and well, they want to sell a surgery… needing a prescription for the cream and unable to get rid of this doubt (the paranoid viewpoint vs the emergent mystical bad luck in life viewpoint) I looked up the urologists at the same hospital (this was 10 years after the infibulation) and made an appointment with a colleague of the original urologist (I was afraid I would end up attacking the dude). I describe her my past, she looks me up in the database, not there! oh right! that confirms my suspicion/memory that the operation was paid under the table… she checks out my genitals, recommends (full) circumcision. I ask about any alternatives, she says no. I ask about partial circumcision: she says they don’t do that any more “looks like a flower” were her words. I ask about any other alternatives. She says no again. I mention the topical steroid, visibly disappointed she gives me the instructions for using the topical steroid. At the end I ask her: now do I need the cream or the ointment? She asks back: is there any difference? I point out a cream is hydrophobic, and an ointment hydrophyllic. Angrily she answers: then you need the cream! She writes the prescription, and I walk out. Slowly it works. like a charm, no pain, no others fondling genitals, no risk of crooked dick etc… I also walked out with a very dark and grim world-view confirmed, but certainty feels much better than doubt!
Circumcision is a hammer looking for a nail…
Pics or it never happened!
http://orig07.deviantart.net/e972/f/2012/354/9/a/ew_gross_by_arrkhal-d5okpi4.png
“Pics or it never happened!”
^ THIS ! I still regret enormously not recording the conversation…
I could however show a picture of one of the contraptions I made to continuously increase the diameter of stretch…
For those too lazy to build such a thing I’d say order a bunch of “stretchers” that people use in their ears, order one for each size (they increment in 1mm steps at least in europe)
I also forgot to add, somewhere early 20th century, it was discovered that foreskins (which still had to grow, hence contained stem cells) considered waste byproduct of circumcision, could be stretched and cultured to grow skin grafts (not entirely unlike what PurpleTurdBracket suggests) to cover burn wounds to prevent water from evaporating out of burn victim bodies. This became an industry, with surgeons selling foreskins (another conflict of interest). The technology matured so that a single foreskin could become a huge (!) area of skin graft, presumably with growth factors, although the exact mechanisms and growth equations would have probably been trade secrets.
I think (but not sure) foreskins are no longer used to grow skin grafts. Anyone having phimosis treated during this era: companies knew the methods of stretching and promoting foreskin to grow, and instead of using it on yours while it was still attached, it was simply amputated and then sold!
My grandfather used mine as a fan belt for his car, it did not require much stretching.
correction: I _think_ they are no longer used for dressing burn wounds. But they are most probably still used for bio-compatibility testing of skin-care, make-up, etc products: first on pig skin (cheapest), then on foreskin skin grafts (less cheap, as more labour, chemicals,… and of course a foreskin is involved, but still cheaper than on human volunteers / test subjects since skin grafts dont start lawsuits), only then tested on humans…
forgot to add for those who want to use contraption or an ear stretcher, dont just put it in your foreskin, put it in a condom first, and expel the air, so the glans stays moist
Not happy with simply posting his fantasies about young girls i.e. minors it would appear that ludwig von pedobear also likes to publish medical advice without any evidence that ludwig is qualified or authorized (registered) to do so.
Dan#whatever has Aspergers. It is very important for him (mentally) to have the last word and cannot except any other opinion (even if he is wrong). It is recommended to simply ignore his comments and certainly do not respond to his comments. He will often come back many days after an article to fill in his ideas.
Agreed. It is obvious from his comments he responds (and argues) in a child-like way.
You are right, this is a diagnostic device, not a treatment. Patients need to understand their disease, this just helps. Most patients would not have the educational background to understand the scientific method of measuring blood glucose anyway. Its not rocket science for a biochemistry major, but its well above the scientific understanding of most people. Also, there are multiple methods for measuring blood glucose. The meters above use an electro-chemical reaction, there are also meters that use optical techniques. Im not here to argue, or to make people mad, I just want people to understand that taking medical advice from a hacked-together project is bad. Creating a device that gives medical advice is also taking on liability that cant be waived away with any number of warnings.
1) “You are right, this is a diagnostic device, not a treatment.”
The (still surprisingly often not complied with) requirement of separation between diagnosis and treatment serves to prevent conflict of interest: when the diagnosing adviser is also the seller of treatment, the adviser will feel incentive to advise whatever he is stocked with (examples: economical incentive-> the quack recommending his mistletoe if stock is high and its selling too slow, sexual incentive-> the doctor diagnosing the woman with “hysteria”).
This is why the same person is not allowed to be say a doctor and a pharmacist simultaneously… however this does not prevent people from “cooperating” (conspiring/collaborating)…
2) “Patients need to understand their disease, this just helps. Most patients would not have the educational background to understand the scientific method of measuring blood glucose anyway.”
The requirement of informed consent serves to arm the patient with
A: the requisite knowledge to be able to understand and criticize the derivation that proves the diagnosis (otherwise diagnosis of “hysteria” combated with requirement of informed consent just becomes diagnosis of “acute lack of willy nilly genital massage” which would still not explain why the patient needs it, its just a re-iteration of the claim)
B: the requisite knowledge to be able to understand and criticize the derivation that proves the treatment is the most desirable method to fix the condition (otherwise the treatment with mistletoe combated with the requirement of informed consent would just becomes “because mistletoe cures back-ache”)
C: censorship-free access to the feedback of patients/scientists/doctors/… of both camps recommending for and against a specific method of diagnosis or method of treatment
3) “Im not here to argue, or to make people mad, I just want people to understand that taking medical advice from a hacked-together project is bad.”
Unlike you I am here exactly to argue and learn, as we can all learn from each other.
Just like you I am not here to make people mad.
I agree in this sense: without freely accessible supplied proofs, taking medical advice from any project (commercial or “hacked-together”) is bad.
4) “Creating a device that gives medical advice is also taking on liability that cant be waived away with any number of warnings.”
I agree, that portraying a device as giving correct medical device without ensuring informed consent (as lined out above) is taking on liability that cant be waived with any number of warnings, and this holds equally for the hacked-together as for the commercial devices!
Informed consent is a legal term and has nothing to do with this technical discussion, even if you were capable of acutely defining it, which clearly you are not.
@Dan
The meaning of natural language and phrases is determined by those who use it. As long as laws are written in natural languages it is ultimately up to the judge to agree or disagree with this interpretation if a lawyer decides to use it.
You are so full of hot air that it is hilarious, you know damn well that you are talking out of your sphincter because if your schizoid interpretation of reality was even remotely valid some parasitic lawyer would have exploited it to make money.
@Dan
“Informed consent is a legal term and has nothing to do with this technical discussion …”
I don’t understand why you assume legal discussions and technical discussions to be disjoint? I consider the practice of having law to be a technique to discourage inhumane interactions between humans, and in this sense is technology too.
“… even if you were capable of acutely defining it, which clearly you are not.”
Ah, good that you bring up the issue of clarity! As long as people disagree on interpretation of the law, then technically speaking the law is void for vagueness… if your point is that the law should someday be formalized such that lawyer’s proofs can be formally verified by neutral proof verifiers (like using MetaMath software) instead of judges then I certainly agree…
Come on, out with it, answer the original question I put to you, state your “Point of Law” and nominate a jurisdiction in which case law shows that it may be valid, also list references to the relevant case law.
Is that technical enough for you?
Do keep in mind that in some jurisdictions giving misleading advice as to a person’s rights under the law is itself an unlawful act.
We await your substantive reply and the diminishment of the hot vapours emanating from your various orificia.
It is important for people to ignore the comments of Dan#whatever. His mental condition does not allow him to form cogent arguments, and he will often respond with name calling for lack of social skill required to communicate properly.
“For one a minor cannot give informed consent”
I _fully_ agree that a minor cannot give informed consent, at least we agree there!
I never said the “young (sexually inexperienced) girl” in the hypothetical example was a minor.
I for example still lived with my parents at age 21/22 when I was still sexually inexperienced and enjoyed a fantastic (first) consensual intercourse, with an absolutely adorable girl only one year younger than me…
I will not however sink to your low “ad hominem” level, and apply your method of reasoning on your creative imagination of declaring the girl a minor…
I understand your desire for open and free information. You can probably find that kind of info buried in a dozen different PHD papers strewn about. The problem is money, it doesn’t just take millions of dollars and a year of development, it takes tens of millions of dollars and multiple years of development to make sure that the end product is something that wont end up killing the patient. The relationship between the FDA and businesses that develop medical technology is very complicated. The effect is that the FDA makes medical products safe, but at the same time makes medical products very expensive. Every aspect of the device is tested to requirements (including every line of code). All claims must be backed up with evidence. The company that takes on this kind of risk and investment wants to make sure that their effort was worth while. If they didn’t, most of the technology that keeps people alive past 50 would not exist. Its easy to demonize a company that wants to make money, especially when it looks like they are taking advantage of a person that has a life threatening disease. That combined with the way patents work, makes the medical field very competitive. The alternative is not having the technology, I like it better this way.
PS, I no longer work for the maker of a glucose meter, but I am still in the medical field.
Boy, that escalated quickly! XD
It’s even worse when you watch it happen ‘live’. :/
As someone who has worked several years in R&D developing blood glucose sensors, I can tell you, only adding a potentiostat (it’s not just a current meter) and calibrating with glucose solutions is not sufficient. Reliably determining glucose levels in capillary blood is a science in itself: Only one word: Compensation.
You have a lot of additional factors affecting a glucose sensor output such as temperature(!), hematocrit, ion concentration and other factors. All manufacturers have probably their own strategy to compensate such factors. Since getting wrong readings affects applied doses of insulin, the health- risk should not be underestimated! As much as I welcome new approaches from the maker community; I’m very skeptical about this one.
And just one final remark: I don’t work anymore in the diabetes- industry (working in another field of sensor technology now), so my opinion is not affected by any interest.
If you still have to buy the overpriced strips where the money is made, how is this a solution? Sure, you might be able to use the slightly cheaper ones, but that’s not really significant. Making your own strips would be what you really need to do.
Exactly. Even if they can make it so that it kinda sorta works for some of the strips all you have a few bucks savings on a one time cost (which is quite low anyway) of the glucometer. The “Gilette” analogy is so broken for this one.
The machines are cheap compared to the strips. Seems like this is an attempt to solve the wrong problem.
Must suck for those who go on the verge of a coma at 3.5, it seems especially odd considering I would think of it as a mild hypo and in no way life threatening.
Although everyone does have a different body, it might just affect others more than me.
I think this is a really dangerous project. Yes, of course, it’s always great to have open source tools, but this is medical stuff, so if something goes wrong people can DIE and [Tom] will have a VERY bad time… Reverse-engineering for fun is a great thing, but claiming to make a universal glucose meter seems a bit ambitious and as i said quite dangerous without a lot of scientific testing to ensure proper results and a really good insurance. And even with this, if something goes wrong you have to live with the idea that you might have caused somebody’s death. Not fun…
“…so if something goes wrong people can DIE…”
If you think about it, even if things go RIGHT then people will die. Welcome to an ambulance-chasing lawsuit.
Of course “go right” needs elaboration; there are many possible definitions. Start with right = machine does what its designer included in its operation, without malfunction.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/New_Year_Aftermath.jpg