

Wednesday, 12 December 2018


Did I tell you my wife now nurses at the local doctors' surgery? The reason for mentioning this will become apparent in a moment.

If buying my own glucometers, I like to plump for the Beurer GL-50 monitor, which has a USB port at one end, that I can plug into my computer. I like this monitor, because the means of connection just works. I walk the monitor over to the computer, I push a button on my Beurer program on the computer (which I downloaded from their site) and it automatically works out what data points it has already and just sucks in the new ones.

I've had the monitor go kaput a couple of times, frankly I don't think any of them are particularly well-made, but I keep going back to this USB interface. I am incumbent to set up the time and date of the device, every time I do so I have to open the manual to find out how (I downloaded one of those too), so it can be a bit out when e.g. the clocks change, but the difference is never massive.

The downside of this monitor is that neither the monitor, nor the test strips for it, can be got through the NHS, so I need to fund them myself. Strips are important because the cost of the monitor is roughly the equivalent of a month's worth of strips, so the cost of the monitor is soon dwarfed by the cost of the strips. Note that insulin-dependent diabetics don't pay again for medicines (i.e. medicines issued by the NHS) in the UK. I figure I've paid once through my taxes over the years anyway.

Anyway, I'm forever looking to make savings, and the guy at my local surgery offered me this other glucometer, called an AgaMatrix Wireless Jazz. The draw of this machine was that both the machine and the strips, I can get them through the NHS, so no (additional) cost to me. As regards connectivity, they have a little app which sits on your phone, it connects to the monitor using bluetooth, and I can then "share" this data to my computer - I can send an email to myself, or more commonly I store the file in my cloud storage. But my computer can then pick up the file somehow and I can copy/paste the data into my spreadsheet.

In practise this is nowhere near as good as my USB connection. In practise, the phone and the monitor can be right next to each other, yet can't "see" each other. I always got it working in the end, but have had to faff around pairing and unpairing the two devices in the past. Nowhere near as reliable as that physical connection I get with USB.

I first used this monitor on 16th August, and last weekend it decided to pack up, it persistently showed an error when I put a test strip in. Same error with many test strips. So that's about the lifespan of these devices - four months. Just long enough to pop in a fresh set of batteries, but I shan't cry about that. It makes sense to replace like for like, as I have approx 75 unused test strips (sounds a lot but I'll use them in the next few months) in my bathroom.

Anyway, the good part about my wife working locally is that she could just ask the pharmacist for a new monitor, which she duly got yesterday.

One plus point of this monitor is that it takes the date and time from my phone every time I sync the two. The phone, in turn, takes its time and date from the network, so in theory it is always accurate.

It is interesting to mote that my last few readings with the "old" Agamatrix were 9 point something, and when it packed up I used the Beurer instead, which read 11. Of course, this could just be that the readings were taken a day apart, so I might have eaten something which caused the higher value. But it could also be the differences between two different meters. In real terms, it is only 10ish% difference, I notice it because one puts me within my target (10) and the other puts me outside. Funny how our minds work. On the offchance that the difference is real, my sugar was 7 today, just because I've tried not to eat anything that might be dodgy these last few days, but the acid test would be to have tested both monitors at the same time, side-by-side. I do have some control solution somewhere (but even that won't be accurate to within 10%).

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