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Comment by joeconway | Hacker News Reader

You may be interested to know that Bayer's Contour USB allows you to pull the information off in an SQLite DB

http://www.bayerdiabetes.co.uk/sections/products-for-my-diab...

Almost all meters allow you to extract data over USB, but the data usually comes out in an obfuscated proprietary format. Do you know which format this exports to? Scott Hanselman had a blog post about this a few years ago (can't seem to find the link).

IMO, every meter should be required to export to CSV at a bare minimum. I will look into the one you linked, but for most users, they really need something that can be easily converted to an xls. The current state of things is that they only export to some supremely terrible proprietary program that is really only meant for an endocrinologist to use with the help of an IT team.

I should be able to easily view my health data and crunch it how I see fit. Decent analytics around my glucose data would be extremely valuable, but the current state of affairs is abysmal.

I really feel your pain. The reason why I love this meter so much is that it doesn't require a £50 USB cable (The usb is built into the meter) the proprietry software is a standalone jar on the USB device which is amazingly quite good. But best of all when you plug the USB device in it mounts as removable storage with a db.sqlite file which is easily accessible and a simple .dump reveals the sensible DB schema. It's really refreshing to be able to get my data and do what I want with it.

Thanks for the tip. I will buy this and try it out, open sourcing any scripts I can write that will assist in the extraction. Do you know of any existing tools?

If it's a sqlite database with a reasonable schema, you can probably get a surprising amount of mileage out of a few simple SQL queries and this command-line tool:

https://www.sqlite.org/sqlite.html

In particular, the CSV output mode could be handy for getting query results into other programs.

Seconding the recommendation. I have this meter for the same reason.

You need to use the Bayer software to talk to it (I'd recommend actually installing the software rather than using the copy from the meter itself). But then the readings are stored in a standard sqlite database without any obfuscation etc. It uses some sort of hash so you can't actually modify things, but for just getting the raw numbers I didn't have any trouble.

Decent analytics exist (disclosure: I am web lead for a company [1] in precisely this device space) but some problems we are facing are situations like the following:

Device manufacturers hiding the ability to decrypt their (proprietary binary blob) file format in the same DLL as their driver, forcing us to install it on the end user's machine, and refusing to release the source code to us either so we could verify it was thread safe and run it on the server or possibly use Emscripten/asm.js on it to be able to package it cross platform in the browser.

In addition a plurality of our userbase is on IE 8 and below. I don't even want to think about their XP situation.

That being said, we have a good start at excellent analytics capability. Feel free to shoot me an email (HN handle at gmail) if you're a device manufacturer, clinician, patient, Scott Hanselman (we're in Portland too! And we use .NET!), or just plain doggone interested in the space or just working on the problem.

[1] http://www.diabetespartner.com. Any feedback on the design is of course welcome. We do in fact support the Bayer Contour mentioned above.

The blog post you are talking about can be found here[0]. Despite an active push by Scott for a standardized data format and communication protocol, little has been done in almost 5 years.

As a person with diabetes for 14 years, I feel frustrated about the roadblocks to accessing my data. I am currently investigating reverse engineering the one touch verioiq.

[0] http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/SweetSpot-The-B...

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