Living with diabetes on the read-write web, part 2

I’ve come to a conclusion after a few months of rigorously sending my blood sugar stats to Sweetspot, it rocks my world!

I’ll admit to being a slacker when it comes to measuring my blood sugar even though my doctors been telling me for 15 years how important it is to know your mmol/l. I’ve always shrugged it off telling myself that I can feel if it’s high or low.

But even if that’s enough I’ve noticed that sometimes I can’t tell the difference between high or low, or even just telling the difference between low and blood sugar that’s rapidly falling. Anyway, it’s not enough to just be able to tell the difference between high and low. I must be able to make decisions based on statistic trends and be able to see how the blood sugar after a meal relates to how much insulin I took and what I ate.

Sweetspot helps me accomplish this in a very simple way and now that they’ve implemented localization and has a mobile interface in the works (or maybe even a native iPhone application?) there’s not much more to ask for.

Here’s the kicker, with the help of Sweetspot my blood sugar has never been better, sure it’s still drifting wildly but on average it’s keeping itself on very good levels.

Another web application that I can’t live without.

Living with diabetes on the read-write web.

Let me just preface this post by saying that today was one of the worst days in a very long time and I’ll get back to why in a moment…

I’ve been living with diabetes for 15 years now. Wow, that’s such a long time. I don’t even consider it a “disease” any more, it’s just a state of being.

Being the tech-savvy dude that I happen to be, I asked myself (or rather; I asked Google) if there was some sweet web application to enter my blood sugar values and medications into.

I almost felt like my Google Skills gained +1 when I immediately found my way to SugarStats. This is a pretty good, but at times a bit too simplistic, blood sugar tracker. It has twitter integration and a good enough mobile interface (though I wish it would be more iPhone friendly).

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon Sweetspot thanks to fellow diabetic and blogger Scott Hanselman. Sweetspot seems like a good alternative to SugarStats with a more dynamic approach to blood sugar tracking. Too bad they lack a spiffy mobile interface but they have one good thing going for them, and that would be their small client application (availble on both Windows and OSX) that will let you sync your blood sugar reader to your Sweetspot account. Pretty cool!

However, both of these services have one major caveat and that is localization. Let me just go Ballmer for a second here;

Localization! Localization! Localization!

Being a swedish citizen, I simply do not write numbers like this (for example) “7.4″. I write them “7,4″. And don’t get me started on date formatting. It’s extremely frustrating to constantly be faced with error messages saying I did not enter a number, date or time correctly when in fact I did.

So let me list some pros and cons with respective service.

SugarStats
+ Simple
+ Has mobile interface
+ Can export data to CSV
+ Free
- Maybe a bit too simple
- No possiblity to get a graph over the current day, only stats
- Localization!

Sweetspot
+ Feature rich
+ Synchronization client
+ Can create graphs over any data you enter
- No mobile interface
- User interface is a bit too much at times
- Localization!

I’m going to give Sweetspot a try for a while, see if I get used to the interface.

So, regarding that first sentence. My day begun with my blood sugar going really low, effectively eliminating any possibility of going to the gym before work. I misjudged my insulin dose and accidentally got a ricochet effect with my blood sugar going waaay too high. So my mood today has not been the best, I’ve been tired and my blood sugar really didn’t pan out until sometime this afternoon. Hell of a way to feel when trying to write some C# code…