CGM Enhancements

Diabetes Technology Glucose Monitoring
1

After i posted this comment a couple days ago,(attached) i got to thinking…I really do wish i worked as a consultant for Dexcom-- in fact i am so interestd in how they receive and ask for user feed back - i emailed their HR department and asked in short - "I am wondering what Dexcom does to get user feedback? Is there a form or feedback mechanism in place? Do you have a user consultant group? "

There are many silly little things about Dex that could be enhanced. I am not talking about things like the lag time with meter reads vs CGM reads—i am talking about things like.

  1. as mentioned in the attachment
    Allow for a second high alarm - this way you can set one to notifiy you, for example, if you bolused enough, soon enough, etc—say 160 or 180—and then set a second for 250 or 270 so if you did make a critical error in insulin intake, carb counting - you dont have to find out when you are 400. (i am desensitized)

  2. Add a 24 hour graph - to me that is better than the 1 hour.

  3. If you are not going to allow for manual calibrations - at least shorten the connector cable to 5 inches. Obviously a manual calibration would be nice…nicer would be the ability to ‘beam’ the results from meter to Dex. (so futuristic—no wait, no it is not, MM does that already)

  4. Add ability to set low alarm and high alarm timing - MM also does this - for the alarms you can set it to re-alert you if you are still low in 20 minutes or 1 hour or whatever.

—i am sure i have more…but i have to get to a meeting now…please add yours… if i get a reply for Dexcom i will see if some of us can get involved in user feedback sessions.
9132-IwishIworkedasaconsultantforDexcom.doc (27 KB)

2

Mollie

Do let us know if you get any feedback. I’d be extremely interested in doing the same.

I’d love to see a different display (even a customizable one). Instead of graphing from 50 to 400, how about just from 50 to 280? If the value is above 280, the numeric display will tell me that and it doesn’t have to show on the graph. This would make it easier for me to see what the value was 4 hours ago, it’s almost impossible to eyeball at present.

Also why not let me set which displays I’d like to see? Maybe I want 1-hour, 6-hour and 12-hour displays. Maybe I want to see 4 different time segments.

How about time zone shifting? It’s not clear to me what happens if I change the time because I’m flying to a different zone. Does that screw the Dexcom up? Does it indicate that I’m in a different zone? I think the Minimed already does this.

And why doesn’t the Dexcom take meter readings and adjust to them more quickly? I hate when the Dexcom says 140 and my meter says 160 and I need to give the Dexcom several nudges with different tests to get it to jump up to 160ish.

In the new software there’s an export facility. It lets me choose to export either the Dexcom values or the meter values, but not both at the same time. Why not change those radio buttons to check boxes and let me export both together into a single XML file or Excel spreadsheet? That would be a very simple fix.

Here’s hoping you hear back from them.