This fantastic rant about the frustrating state of diabetes technology from Scott Hanselman, a type 1 diabetic, has been making its way around the blogosphere and a few of my email chains. In his blog post, he decries the slow pace at which diabetes technology is moving, showing an example of a program he wrote for his PalmPilot in 1998 that was able to give him in-depth analysis of his blood sugar management. He correctly points out some of the major technological issues that people with diabetes still suffer from today, including less-than-optimal accuracy of blood sugar readings, a lack of standards and interoperability, and a lack of useful wireless technology.
Scott is dead-on in the most critical respect here: The typical workflow that a type 1 diabetic still has to endure to acquire his or her glucose values, transmit/download the values, collate values from different devices, and analyze the values is entirely too cumbersome, slow, and inefficient. The current diabetes technology industry has done little to solve this.
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