Review by Walt Mossberg @ WSJ of USB connectable Diabetes Meter

One of the areas I am interest in is easy to use medical measurement devices. Weight, blood pressure, temperature, glucose, pulse, breathing, sleep patterns are among the measurements that can be recorded as part of proactive medicine. These will let us Age In Place much more successfully.



Walt Mossberg has a review of a device that is a small first step toward easy to use and record products, the Bayer Contour USB blood glucose meter

A key piece that is missing from this device, is wireless upload, you have to connect it to your PC via USB. The technology in the area of low power wireless short range communication has really shot forward. I think any device that does not easily transfer its measurements wirelessly to a personal computer or some home health gateway is not useful enough to really jumpstart proactive medicine.

As Walt points out, the other major missing aspect of this device is it lack of ability to upload it's reading to one of the Personal Health Record systems, for example Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health. This is key so that a person's doctor and caregivers can have near real time information about these measurements.

So this is the right direction, just not enough of a step forward yet. Give Mr. Mossberg's text or video review read/listen.

I am excited about wireless devices that will help us live a much more healthy and happy total life.

User interfaces and online personal healthcare record web sites

I have been experimenting with the main online electronic personal medical records web sites. Mostly with Microsoft and Google's offerings. I have found both to be 'works in progress'. Microsoft's HealthVault is on the top of my list right now and the most mature and useable by normal, non-techies.

That said, the HealthVault product received a BIG negative rating mark from me today. I went into the site to add some blood pressure values and found that without notice they had modified their Silverlight based blood pressure data entry widget. I have no idea of all of the changes they made, right away just looking at the GUI you could sense a subtle change in the look. But the negative mark is give for transposing the SAVE and CANCEL button location! What DUMB move to make. It shows me that these developers still do not understand the human aspect of the user interfaces they develop and the profound changes that a change like this in a medical application could have.

On this day of the first flight of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, I can only think of the heads that would roll if a SAVE and CANCEL button were reversed on the flight deck before first flight!

A lot of work and education needs to be done in order to get electronic medical records moving forward successfully.

I have followed Microsoft's work on HealthVault for almost a year now, they are working hard to make a good product. So want to be positive and give them a lot of 'that a boys [and girls]'. But this change today is a example of the experience they need to gain.

I have using this data entry widget on a daily basis for six months now, and noticed when they converted from Adobe Flash tool to Microsoft's Sliverlight. That change, in itself, showed the same lack of experience in code updates and the effect on the application's user. They are still catching up to the speed of operation of the Flash based widget.

I am very sure that in the picture below, the two buttons shown are transposed from were they were located yesterday.