Dario Blood Glucose Monitoring System

Last week, my wife found a new glucose meter via reddit or something, and it was only $40 so it sounded like it was worth giving a shot. It just arrived today, so I figured I'd share my initial thoughts below:

Ordering

My first annoyance was with buying the product. While the intro page tells you all about the meter and how much it costs, the pricing on strips was suspiciously absent. After a few minutes of clicking around the site, I finally tried hitting the [BUY] button, and was treated to actual numbers. In fairness, that could have been my first guess, but I'm easily annoyed.

After placing my order, I was given a stark white page saying "Your order has been placed." No order number, no tracking info, no estimated delivery date. Just a brief affirmation. Okay, whatevs, it'll come when it comes.

Unboxing

And it did come after only a few days, so point for promptness. The meter is just what it says on the tin, a compact housing for test strips, lancet device, and the small square dongle used for actually reading a strip and pumping it into one's phone.

One small quirk did pop up fairly early. The instructions indicate that the test strip cartridge should "snap" into the casing. It doesn't. In fact, when removing the outer cap, it pulls the cartridge out of the casing, then I have to pry the cap off the cartridge, so I can open the cartidge, and fish out the strip. For a device which hinges on convenience and ease of use, this isn't convenient or easy to use. Hopefully this is just an early model engineering defect and not indicative of the poor quality of the device overall.

Using the app

Unsurprisingly, the app wants you to register/login to their site. That's not unexpected. What surprised me here is that the account I created last week (while buying the device) wasn't usable for the actual app. Maybe that's a good thing, if the store is run by a third-party, principle of least privileges and all. But it's certainly inconvenient from a user standpoint.

But finally, I'm ready to take a reading...

Fuuuuuuuudge...

Now, don't judge me on the hipster wood case, I'm very clumsy and it helps me not break phones. I used to have plastic/vinyl wallet cases, but they fall apart in a matter of weeks, and... look, my point is, just a SLIGHTLY longer neck would have made this a lot more usable. Square knows this problem exists, which is why their 2nd gen readers don't match their 1st gen readers.

But it works well enough, the data matches my other meter within tolerance... Wait, no... one more gripe: The app doesn't talk to iOS's health data stream. My current go-to logbook app, MySugr (highly recommend, btw) is able to share data with my phone's OS, which means my apps can work better together.

Conclusion

Not a terrible little device, I'll probably keep it in my hoodie-of-many-pockets for those random occasions where I used to use OneTouch minis, but it's not quite ready for me yet.

Houston, we have a bolus

It took three weeks to filter through Kaiser, but my new insulin pump finally arrived (the purple one on top in the photo below is the new one). My old pump was about seven years old when it broke down for the second time (the first was under warranty, about four years ago). By the way, the old one *IS* turned on, and you *SHOULD* see something on the display.... Hence my problem... Anyway, I wasn't expecting it till tomorrow, but christmas came early (well, I guess technically late) 'cause the FedEx guy rang the bell just as I was headed out the door for work.

SHINEY!!!!!! I haven't had a decent basal profile in nearly a month, so I ripped open the packaging, read the important parts of the instructions and plugged in.... Ah, that's the stuff... I'm now reading through the rest of the manual, here's my thoughts so far:

• Batteries: A+ The MiniMed508 takes three Energizer 357s which... while not terribly hard to find, can be pretty annoying when you forget to replace them and the unit shuts down at 1AM... The new 722 fixes that by taking the larger, but more readily available AAA size.
• Menus: B There's more complexity to the menus (driven by a wider feature set), but the most common task (bolusing) is a quick single-button action. I'd have marked this as an A, but for the fact the bolus amounts no longer wrap-around. Pressing down from 0.0 stays at 0.0, and pressing up from 10.0 stays at 10.0.Update: Turns out the wrap-around does work. You just have to enable it.... Not sure how I enabled it though... Anyway, I'm leaving this at B since the the nag-messages are a bit too insistent... I know what I'm doing damnit... you don't have to be so annoying!
• Backlight: C Same backlight, still not quite enough contrast...
• Delivery mechanics: A Blatently stolen from Diesetronic (a competitor), but a good steal. Smoother, quicker delivery and a nice resevoir window to boot.
• Loading mechanics: A- The resevoir-vial interface is a tiny bit temperamental, but once I get the knack of it, I expect cartridge loading will be twice as fast and accurate as it used to be. The priming mechanics also manage to overcome one of my long standing gripes about volume detection.
• Interface/API: F Same gripe as I had with the MM508. The system is capable of interfacing with external equipment, but the company won't share anything useful about their specs (I knew this from research before hand, but I can still complain about it).
• Durability: TBD We'll see how this one puts up with my.... abuse is too harsh a word.... "active lifestyle".... Let's go with that... At least it's (supposedly) more water-proof than the old one...