does anyone know if there is a way to put an electronic logbook on your blackberry? i’m not talking about connecting your pump to it so you can send BG readings, basal rates, etc. what i’m looking for is a way to enter information like:
physical activity (official “exercise” or just some good old booty shakin’ at the club!)
food intake (not just carbs, but types of food - lots of protein at breakfast? or maybe lots of fat? how about low or high glycemic index foods? would be nice to have a more complete picture of what different types of food do to your BG…)
BG readings (which you could manually enter)
basal rates, if you’re on a pump (which you could easily put in yourself)
stress, temperature change, other things that affect our BG could be entered when they occur
all of this could then be tracked to find patterns, so we could better understand how different factors affect our BG and anticipate future actions to deal with them. i am not a tech person in any way, so this may seem elementary to others. does something like this already exist? can a super low-tech version be created using excel? i mean, the tracking part would be a down-the-road sort of thing, but i would just really like to be able to keep all of this information in a convenient, central location that isn’t the size of a three-ring notebook. i don’t have a blackberry, but i almost always carry my phone with me anyway and would certainly consider upgrading if this were a possibility.
Our free project Glucosurfer.org can be of great help to manage your log with your mobile phone (WAP) or smartphone (HTML) or directly via web.
It will log: BG (mg/dL or mmol/L), activity, carbs (in US and other measurements), rapid and basal insulin.
And for pumps: basal rate, temporary basal rate, distribution of insulin.
Here are examples how this will look like (use your mouse to drag the diagrams): Pen users Pump users
But it can not fullfill all of your wishes. We have decided that we will not log the type of food. All of our team members voted against this option. The reason is simple: after years of experience you will not need this information and you will find it very boring to log that for the rest of your life. For very special food you could fill the note field with a short description of the food. We found that this is sufficient for experienced diabetics.
You mentioned factors like stress or temperature change and I would add other factors to that list: site change (for pump users) or current work shift or illness or menstruation cycle or water intake or time zone or …
This again was considered as not very important since you will know how you react to stress or temperature change. Of course the work shift would be interesting. And of course it would help women to better cope with the menstruation cycle. But this has to be logged somehow in a convenient way. We are thinking about that too but right now we are keeping our Glucosurfer very focused.
WOW! This is amazing! Like you said, it doesn’t take all the inputs I wish it would (and while I’ve been T1 for nearly a decade and consider myself “experienced,” I still think my diabetes self-knowledge can always be improved), but I must say you have created quite a tool. Thank you so much for sharing it with me; I will certainly put it to good use!
I have a Treo phone which has a palm pilot. I downloaded a program called Diabetes Pilot that I really like. It has a food database that I can add to, place to record BGs, meds (ie: insulin) food, exercise, BP, and notes. It gives me reports such as average BGs, BGs related to meals, exercise, bedtime, etc, glucose graft, total insulin used, and food report that gives me the total carbs, fiber, sugar,total calories, fat calories, fat, protien, sodium and cholesterol. I really like it. I can sinc it with the computer and get even more reports. I found this program from palm.com. I did need to purchase it but I personally think is it worth it for me.
I have a Palm Centro that I downloaded some software onto from Calorie King’s website. It’s their Diet Diary and their Diabetes Log for Palm OS. They also have a pocket PC version available, but I’m not sure if that would work with a Blackberry or not. The Diet Diary is basically their food database that you download onto your phone and the diabetes log will track BG’s and insulin intake. Through the Food Diary is where I track all my exercise and it then will tell me how many calories I’ve burned with the exercise. It’s pretty nice. Because I have both softwares, I can log my food into the diary, and it then communicates with the diabetes log software to import my food intake to it so I’m not putting in double entries. I had the same software for an old Palm PDA that I had gotten. So when it was time to upgrade my cell phone, I went with another Palm because I wanted to keep using the same software.
