Recording Data On The Move
Posted by: VBH in Untagged on
Feb 20, 2009
One of the projects I really need to get my finger out with is recording BG numbers on my phone. Although all meters will store your BG results, they mostly do not have any way of recording the additional information that makes the data useful.
I have been using PDA phones for years. These are basically a phone and computer combined and the ones I have been using have a version of Windows on them. Frankly I spend more time reading books and news on it than anything else but it has other uses.
One of these uses is recording BG data. Along with the actual numbers, I need to record time since last meal, type of test (pre, post, fasting) and some notes on what was eaten, any exercise taken etc. I'm just bunging it in excel for the moment and shoving it all in a database at a later date.
However, I have another stalled project (that I was going to finish in August 2008) for a website to record BG. What I would also like to do is write a quick program to record this data and squirt it into the same database as the web version the next time I connect my phone to either the web or to my PC.
From throwing the idea around in the past, it does not seem like many people have anything similar. I suspect that most people do not have phones powerful enough to run such an app. If there is anyone else who would be interested I would like to hear from them.
The other problem of course is that there are so many operating systems for phones from Microsoft, Palm, Google, Symbian etc. At one time you would be able to write a single application for all of them, just generating installers for each one from your base program. Thats not possible any more since the only company which made this possible went bust and got bought up by Oracle who killed the system.
Still, if I ever do get around to it, it should be worth doing. I would also get away from this lazy recording I do at the moment which frankly is far more effort than it should be.
Now all I need to do is set aside some time to get my finger out and actually do it.....
....oh dear.
Comments (2)
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An couple of alternatives are:
1. Write a mobile-friendly version of the website (i.e. heavily stripped down) which you can access over WAP/3G (potentially expensive if you load the page many times)
2. Write a java app that submits the data to the website via a URL (http://example.com/logData.php...e&carbs=60 etc.), which then adds it to the database. This option would limit the amount of data that can be easily sent, but for anything short of an essay should be adequate, and shouldn't cost more than a couple of pence per update at the most.
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WAP is too limited.
3G is expensive even for those limited number of people who have it
Browsing in any form is too long winded. By the time you got into a site you would have forgotten what your BG was. Also you could not store anything on the phone for offline use.
Depending on connectivity also rules out PDA users. Or a completely different solution to write just for PDA users.
So it will have to be an app which has options to sync or connect direct to a fast web service.
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