Charmr. The future for insulin pumps and CGMs?

Amy Tenderich posted an open letter in April that expressed her frustration with current diabetes devices.

This has been a recurrent theme on diabetes blogs for some time. In the book Universal Principles of Design, there's a Hierarchy of Needs that follows Maslow's hierarchy for self-actualization. This principle argues that a design can't be Creative before it empowers people to be Proficient. And it can't enable Proficiency until the design is Usable. Usability builds on Reliability and Reliability on Functionality.

The trouble is that the diabetes devices have been stuck at the Reliable and Functional levels of the hierarchy for way too long.

Amy's challenge was to get past what we use today and start providing us with devices that are 'insanely great', like this types of things we expect from Apple.

The (insanely) great news is that the design firm Adaptive Path have taken up this challenge. They've created a concept device called the Charmr, and they've blogged extensively about their design process for the Charmr. There's even a Charmr video on YouTube.

My hope is that diabetes device makers take this challenge seriously. And that they also remember that all devices are part of a larger system.

This system includes: those of us with diabetes; our various devices; the data collected by the devices (insulin intake, blood glucose readings, health information, etc.); and our healthcare team(s).

Remember the iPod? It's successful because it combines the iPod hardware with software that allows us to add music from a variety of sources.

Our diabetes devices will only really be successful when they combine beauty (creativity) and all the other important design attributes with the ability to get the data off the devices and easily share it with other devices and systems. In other words when the accompanying software is an integral part of the system, instead of an afterthought.

Labels: charmr, datastandards, design, devices

posted by Bernard @ 4:23 PM 3 Comments Links to this post  

MedApps D-PAL remote patient monitoring approved by FDA

This by way of MedGadget.

The MedApps system is designed to transmit glucose readings to a central server by way of your cellphone. It's now been approved for over-the-counter use.

The illustration from MedApps all show a OneTouch Ultra meter, but their information claims 'the BluePAL technology wirelessly transmits data from 20 of the most popular glucose devices from 4 of the leading manufacturers'.



They provide a device (Polymap Polytel) that connects to the meter and sends the data via Bluetooth to your cell phone. The cell phone transmits the data to a MedApps central server. The system can be setup to send alerts to healthcare providers based on per-patient thresholds.

It all sounds interesting, but there's a lot of steps from meter to software. Now if all the meter makers agreed on a single data standard, this would all be a little easier.

Labels: Bluetooth, datastandards, diabetes, FDA, MedApps

posted by Bernard @ 2:33 PM 4 Comments Links to this post