Because my local CVS had such a great deal on it going ($29.99 through the end of August), I acquired a One Touch Ultra Smart to add into the review set. While the meter and case are much larger than every other meter under review except the Advocate Duo, the meter has a built-in electronic logbook with a number of nice features, including:
- user-settable meal-period times
- place to enter doctor visits
- place to enter basic food consumption (calories, plus grams of protein/fat/carb)
- customizable medication indicators and insulin indicators
- exercise indicators
- place to enter other health information (A1C, blood pressure, cholesterol)
While there is a place to store the information, the data-entry interface is still quite primitive and limited to up-and-down arrows. This makes direct data entry much more tedious than I would have expected.
On the plus side: the few readings I've acquired so far show this meter to be within range of both the Freestyle Flash and the other two One Touch monitors during a period of stable/normal glucose. Dinner did spike me a bit (i.e., 2-hour postprandial over 130), though, and the four meters gave what for me is a very broad spread of readings: 163 on the Ultra 2, 154 on the Ultra Mini, 142 on the Ultra Smart, and 136 on the Freestyle Flash. The four tests were drawn from the same forearm sample, within less than a minute total time. This is about a 20% spread from lowest reading to highest reading -- so still, in theory, "within expected accuracy" of a hypothetical lab reading of the average -- and it is a single data point, which could in itself be rogue.
I'll have more on this meter and the others coming up next week. I'm expecting to be on hiatus this week as I do some more last-minute costuming work.