I recently went in to get my throat checked and in the process found out that I have diabetes. I now have to track my blood sugar and the doc even wants to know what I eat. I did a search for software to help track this information and as you may well know, I saw nothing for OS/2. A win solution doesn't fit for me as I do not want to reboot to do this. I'm staying with what I know...
I did find a template that I could use in 123 but it's kinda' "heavy" for something I just want to use to spot a number or meal info into three or four times a day. Like any good blue-blooded OS/2 user, I began a project to make it work for me.
At the start of this project I am asking if there are any others out there that have a need for a program like this. I would like to make it available for testing, feedback and use. Is this something we need?
Here are the capabilities so far...
- Track Bg readings for meals and snacks (pre/post), bedtime, fasting and "other".
- Track daily average of readings.
- Track weight.
- Track Appointments and Reminders.
- Track meal contents. (breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack)
- Track meal "Calories, Protein, Carbs and Fat" as well as their daily totals.
- Build menu's for point and click data entry with a Menu Builder
- Graph "All" Bg values, "Daily average" or "Selected fields" in user selected date ranges.
- Print BgLevel reports, meal reports and graphs suitable for your physician or dietician.
- Preview BgLevel reports, meal reports and graphs. (Combined report only at this time)
- Download information from your glucometer. (Accu-Chek Advantage only for now).
Things are moving along nicely with the program. A few comments follow...
- The program data is currently being housed in a database that is written without the aid of a database driver. This makes it load instantly for now but when the db gets larger I am afraid it will bog down. So far I have tested it with a years worth of data and it took about 7 secs to load and 10 secs to save. There is also the future consideration of deeper relationships than are currently being implemented. If you know of a reasonable way or of a product to do a good database that will be small, fast and any user can use it without having to pay more for it, please let me know.
- Being quite new to the glucometer game, I don't know a whole lot about it but there are serial cable hookups and software for downloading data from many glucometers. I would like to get this working for as many as possible but I can make no promises. So far we have been able to access one glucometer but hope to include a few more when time permits. After the beating I've taken over figuring out the first one, I may have to take some time away from it just to let my head clear.
- With the addition of meter reading it became imperitive to add a time field to use the meter data effectively. This caused a complete rewrite of the databases, loading, saving, charts and printing routines. I elected to go the same route as the commercial software I obtained from Boehringer-Mannhiem's Camit software. After all the work... I am not happy with the direction it took. It caused a lot more headaches but I am afraid it may be too late to turn back now. I hope this change will not cause any problem for the good users of the program.
For over a month and over 500 hours of work (yes... 528 to be exact) I have lived, slept and breathed this program with no other priorities. This is essentially a labor of love, so to speak and I need to get back to making a living so the updates may come slower in the future.
If you, your family or friends have to track blood sugar and are looking for an OS/2 solution, please contact me.