Bastian Hauck, type-1 diabetic and founder of Adventure Diabetes, tells us the patient prospective on the slow evolution of Healthcare informatics: ββ¦.While reality increasingly goes digital to meet on my iPhone β friends via social media, work via mobile computing and the Cloud β my home via remote access, Bluetooth and Wifi, and even my phone itself via GPS, smart gestures and SIRI, my diabetes does not.β
"...I was diagnosed with Diabetes Type I in December 1997 at the age of 19. I had just graduated from high school, moved to the city, started university and was in the middle of applying for Harvard and MIT scholarships. I thought personal computers and Microsoft Windows 95 uncool, had gone through my range of Ataris and C64s, and was proud owner of my first Apple Macintosh Performa β 56k modem and all. And my first, brick-like cellphone was soon to be exchanged for Nokiaβs 7622, one of the first mobile phones with WAP technology: Internet on the go.
However, I do not remember being disappointed when being handed my first blood glucose meter. It measured my blood sugar level β accurately, relatively fast and reliable. Thatβs what it was supposed to do, and that is what it did. Nothing more, nothing less. No questions asked.
Now 15 years later, my current phone has more RAM than my first Atari had for a hard drive. As for my blood glucose monitor (BGM), it has seen several updates and is now even more accurate, more reliable and somewhat faster than ever before. It looks better, too. And it still measures my blood sugar β nothing more, nothing less. No multi-tasking, no wireless, no interconnectivity, apart from being able to share data via Infrared, a connectivity option I have last seen on an old Toshiba I had to use for work about a decade ago. Oh, there is a USB adaptor, a cable and a CD, which only works on Windows though, with the look and feel of programming in Basic or C++. Great..."
