The Diabetic Jornal for iPhone and iPod Touch

Nial Giocamelli and I have something in common. He has Type 1 diabetes. Like me, his brain now needs to do the work that his pancreas and endocrine system used to do. He has to calculate the amount of carbohydrates in each meal, compute the correct amount of insulin he needs, test his blood glucose, and inject that insulin.

This is part of diabetes management. All this data on what we eat and when we eat and what dosage of insulin we took and what the blood glucose is at any given time is useful when we visit my doctor. It can be used to adjust treatment or just to make sure things are under control. It's a lot of data.

A single entry for breakfast involves knowing the amount of carbohydrate, the BG reading, the insulin injected and the time of day. There are a few apps in the iOS App Store for entering this data but it's a manual process. Very few of them have any graphing or charting and there is no easy way to share the data with the doctor. They are difficult to use, ugly and expensive -- anywhere from $2.99 to $.799. They don't learn user habits or provide any real analysis. in my opinion the apps in the App Store are no better than a digital version of pen and paper.

Nial wants to change all that. Imagine if an app could use my diabetes facts to suggest a reduction in dosing because it knew that my blood glucose drops just before lunch based? Imagine if that app understood that since I ate pizza that I might be in for a roller coaster BG effect in a few hours? Imagine if that app was FREE?

Most of the existing diabetic applications on the App Store make it tedious and difficult to keep your journal up to date. After all, my disease takes up so much of my life already that I didn't want to spend any more time than necessary recording data. So I built my own diabetic journal application, and I made it fast. More importantly, I made it intelligent.Nial Giacomelli

Features include:

  • The ability to track and report on daily athletic activities, meals (and carb intake), as well as medication and blood glucose readings.
  • A system which monitors your medication schedule and intelligently pre-populates fields to save you from monotonous typing!
  • A blazingly fast autocomplete system.
  • Fully internationalised, with automatic BG unit conversion between mg/dL and mmoI/L. The journal works everywhere.
  • Medication reminders (including a geofence that'll remind you to take your medication when you leave the house)
  • View entries across a rolling six month period or break it down by entries entered within the past 7 or 14 days
  • A fast and beautiful gesture-based interface

Nial hopes to accomplish something great with his app, the Diabetic Journal. He wants to make it so that everyone has access to top notch diabetes management software. I want to help him.

Nial has the support of noted web gurus Cameron Moll, Jeffrey Zeldman and others.

Unfortunately he is running into issues raising the initial capital to get the project funded. He has started a Kickstarter project to raise money but time is running out. Please visit the Diabetes Journal Kickstarter page and help fund this project.

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Author: Khürt Williams

A human who works in information security and enjoys photography, Formula 1 and craft ale. #nobridge