A few weeks ago Techcrunch announced the $3.5 million in funding that Glooko received to connect Glucose meters to iPhones for tracking diabetes. Here’s a description of Glooko:
Launched last year, Glooko is a digital logbook for people with diabetes who have to check their blood sugar every day. There are dozens of glucose logbooks in iTunes, but almost all of them require manual entry. What makes Glooko different is that the company designed a $40 cable (sold separately) that works with seven of the top glucose meters. You just plug it into both devices and it downloads your daily readings.
This is an interesting approach because it allows someone to use the Glucose meter that they’re use to using all of the time. Although, I don’t know many people that want to carry around a glucose meter with their phone and a cable to connect the two. I’m sure that Glooko would argue that the problem is that the glucose meters don’t support a wireless (bluetooth or NFC I suppose) technology for the exchange of that data. They’re right that it is a limitation of the traditional glucose meters.
The solution is to go down the path that AgaMatrix has gone down with their blood glucose meter that attaches to the iPhone. Basically it makes your blood glucose meter the size of a thumb drive. If you don’t want to carry your phone, you can just carry the small meter and some strips (yep, I don’t know if we’ll ever get away from the strips). Then, when you hook the meter back up to your iPhone it uploads all the data. Or, just leave it attached to your phone since it’s not that big.
I’ll be interested to see how well Glooko does with their $3.5 million in investment. There’s a lot of people focusing on the diabetes market.