iPad and iPhone applications for diabetes management

As many people with diabetes have used a variety of different glucometers, insulin pumps and other gadgets to control sugar levels, there are not that many nice applications that can put all the data together for the doctor to see in a very user friendly forma. I decided to do a quick research on currently available iPhone and iPad applications for people with diabetes. We can agree that the days of recording and monitoring insulin levels, calories and sugar levels on paper are long gone. As more diabetes related medical devices such as insulin pumps and glucose meters are becoming more compatible with PCs, Macs and cell phones, the trend will likely increase over the next decade as it is projected that over more than 30 million Americans will suffer from either Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. The market projections for developing more diabetic medical devices and user friendly software is expected to net billions of dollars for pharmaceutical and software companies. Have no fear, the advent of new technologies that can interface with your glucose pumps, cell phones, desktops, iPad and laptops will be more practical to successfully monitor your health, exercise regimens and insulin intake. Today, if you have an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or an Android phone, you can download applications from your phone from iTunes, the Applestore, freeware sites and other websites for under $5.00 Here are a few applications listed here for starters. All these applications can be obtained through iTunes for less than $5.00! 1. Glucose buddy- This application lets you keep track and record your daily glucose levels, insulin intake, exercise regimens and provides basic statistical analyses of trends and averages. You can interact with the Glucose buddy forum to network with other people through the Internet. It is worth noting that their bar graphs are very colorful and enticing to see. This application is available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod. 2. WaveSense - Probably the most popular diabetes application to date from AgaMatrix. This application also allows you to log and record your glucose levels, calories, exercise regimen and take personal notes. It provides a better statistical analysis of daily, weekly, and monthly averages and projections. High, low, mode, variability, scatter plots, bar graphs, etc... are one of the few statistical analyses provided. You can directly send your results to your physician for their perusal.This application is also available for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. 3. OnTrack - Like the other aforementioned applications, this application allows you to lose monitor your pulse, blood pressure, weight and body fat which also makes it a useful weight loss application. Moreover, it provides basic statistical analyses and allows you to track your glucose and insulin levels. It is available for $2.00 and is extremely user friendly as results can be exported via e-mail to your medical team. This application is only available for the Android. 4. Vree-- This new application from Merck lets you also monitor and record your blood glucose levels, exercise, weight, blood pressure, and food and other medication intake. On the plus side, it comes with an encyclopedia calorie counter, tips and articles for weight loss and nutrition. On the downside, it does not come with a built-in feature to monitor insulin doses. This application is also available for the iPhone, iPod and iPad. Also, a few reviews have complained about the lack of a feature that allows you to monitor and send data more than 1 week's worth of data to your doctor. 5.Diabetes Tracker- Like all the other applications, it allows you to monitor your glucose levels, insulin levels, calories and exercise activities. However, this application allows you to track different types of insulin (slow, regular and fast insulin) throughout the day, gives you more statistical analysis, trends and projections. It is available for the Android for $1.49. More to come:IBGstar Diabetes Manager- This is the default application for the IBGstar glucose meter, a peripheral device that directly attaches to the iPhone4 to measure your glucose levels. It will provide a log function to record glucose and insulin levels, an alert system to alert you of important scheduled glucose reading and insulin shots, a trend chart for statistical analysis feature for calculating your daily, monthly and weekly trends and emails your results to your physician. This powerful application is expected to cost around $50.00 but provides more powerful statistical analyses of bio-stats, has better pull-down and touchscreen menu and interfaces with your laptop and desktop via the iPhone 4. It will hit the Apple store soon on March. Bottomline- The only thing or important feature missing in all iPhone and Android diabetes applications is the ability for the software to calculate the projected basal insulin levels in order to know how much insulin to inject before and after meals. However, fancy and "smart" applications that give this kind of projections require complex algorithms and only your physician can readjust the basal insulin intake. Did you find this article interesting? Will you like to receive more email alerts about medical technology related news? Then consider subscribing to my blog. If you have a blog, I will follow back!