Just a quick up to note that we’ve quickly added customizable glucose ranges as it was highly requested. We quickly implemented a simple and basic solution that will work for the majority of people.

You specify a range between what you consider low and what you consider high (i.e: 70-150), that then becomes your in-range value. Anything below is consider low and anything above is high.

You can easily see what your (more…)

Public Sharing

We’re introducing a small new feature for all accounts called Public URL sharing. This makes things a bit easier to share your statistics while at the same time not having to create a TrustedVue login for everyone you to see them.

What will I see?

You’ll now see a “Share” link at the top of many pages. When Public Sharing is turned on you’ll then be presented with a URL you can copy/paste and send anywhere and to anyone you like. Put it in an Email, Blog post, Social Network, Instant Message or anywhere else you like. You basically get an address you can hotlink anywhere.

What will viewers see?

When people go to this page, they’ll see your statistics in a read-only view as well as a limited navigation for common pages. It is similar to what TrustedVue users see, but with a limited subset of data and they isn’t any messaging. For your immediate diabetes support team and the people you trust, we still recommend giving them each a TrustedVue login.

Right now you can only share single day pages and multi-day statistics/trend pages. We’ll be implementing the graphs in the near future

Privacy

You’re data is of course up to you to choose to share so public sharing is disabled by default. You can easily turn it on my clicking the checkbox in your settings.

For more info on Public Sharing and how to enable it please visit the Public Sharing Help Wiki Page

Multiple Entry Single Input Form

This has been a popular request and is something that will hopefully make it easier to input a large amount of various entries at once. This makes it easy to input all your sugar, med, food and activity entries in one form at the end of the day for example.

We give you quite a few by default and you can always add more by clicking, well, “Add More” Blank entries will be skipped so you don’t have to worry about removing them before submitting.

Set time for entries input via Email or Twitter

Now you can input entries later in the day and still specify a specific time in which the entry happened earlier. Specifying the time is optional and looks like this:

Some examples Via Email:

bg 146 at 11am This is my comment
bg 190 at 1:10pm 
bg 111 @ 12pm
med [med_mobile_code] 6 at 8:15am optional comment
med [med_mobile_code] 10 @ 11pm

Some examples via Twitter.com:

d ss1 bg 146 at 11am This is my comment
d ss1 bg 190 at 1:10pm 
d ss1 bg 111 @ 12pm
d ss1 med [med_mobile_code] 6 at 8:15am optional comment
d ss1 med [med_mobile_code] 10 @ 11pm

Up next we’ll be working on ways to input food and activity entries as well as set events/tags for each entry so stay tuned. For more info check out the Mobile Input Help Page

Other changes

We’ve made a few smaller changes as well:

• Overall design tweaks throughout the application.
• Added compression to the web pages meaning things should feel a bit snappier
• Improved the messaging in SugarStats. Messages are displayed in a nicer format.
• RSS Feeds for the public view. Private RSS feeds for non-public shared accounts coming soon.
• Tons of minor bug fixes

We’ve got tons of even more great new stuff coming out very soon too so stay tuned!

Someone posed a great question to me the other day and it really got me thinking.  Not really so much about the question, but more about the flood of answers that popped up in my head.

The question was:

“What would make me log on sugar stats versus writing info on a paper log, which I don’t do”

While sometimes I tend to think the advantages of online tracking and sharing obvious, it is a reality that to some people, maybe even many, it isn’t.  There are hundreds of millions of diabetic people out there, many not tech savvy all and some who completely hate technology altogether. 

But even if it is obvious to some, it is a great question with a variety of answers. A few of which stick out for me personally:

• Data Aggregation, Trends and Graphs – You can write entries in a log book, but the log book isn’t going to take that data and create useful statistics, trends and graphs out of it.

• A Variety of Input Methods – Other than a pen or pencil that is.  Inputting sugar readings or medication Via Web, Email, Twitter etc, depending on what you use daily, could turn out to be quite convenient for you.

• Sharing. Virtual Viewing, Anywhere – You can only show a logbook to those you bring it to.  Having it online lets you share it, privately or publicly, to whomever you want to anywhere in the world.  The days of needing the schedule a doctors visit which ends up being 10min long as he briefly glances of your likely incomplete log book.  This brings in a new level of flexibility and collaboration with your health-care providers and physicians.

• Social Support – Similar to the point above, having the social support around your progress is a huge factoring in your diabetic health.  With new online resources come out, sites like TuDiabetes.com where people can congregate, share experiences and get motivation to take control and keep it. Plus we’re in the process of adding even more features

• Conscious Awareness – To me, this is one of the main reasons.  Really, you can’t fully know your status or progress unless you’re tracking various bits of info over time. Having to keep these bits of info in mind, daily, brings it to your attention.  Ever heard of “Out of sight, out of mind?”, well that can apply to your diabetes health too.

    Keeping it in mind helps you “keep things” in mind, you tend to make better decisions (About food, things you do etc). Being conscious about it helps you be aware of the things you do daily that affect your diabetes.  Granted this can also happen with writing down your stats in a log book, though having a online solution might fit better into your daily lifestyle.
  

Those are a few of the prominent thoughts I had. Though when it comes down to it, it is really about finding the tools and solutions that work and fit best FOR YOU.  We could really implement every feature under the sun (Trust me, we won’t) but if it doesn’t fit in your particular lifestyle or is something you don’t like using then none of that matters.

In the end what we’re trying to do is creating new and creative tools that people can use daily to improve and monitor their diabetes that fit in this modern age era which we live. All in all I have to say it is great to see so many advancements on so many fronts happening. It is exciting to see things evolve, for the industry and individuals alike.

Twitter Integration

We’re happy to announce Twitter.com integration with SugarStats! Now you can quickly add sugar and med entries via Twitter direct message to our ss1 Twitter account.

The great thing about this is now you also have the ability to choose from the monstrous array of 3rd party twitter apps on top of Web, IM, SMS for inputting entries into SugarStats.

Now you can just send a Twitter message like this:

Then an entry of 108 goes directly into your SugarStats account at the date and time of the message; Comment optional.

If you want to share your sugar info with your Twitter circle you can enable the option within SugarStats to have new entries posted to your Twitter account. This is just the beginning and we’ll be improving it as time goes on, including adding events/tags.

For all the details and instructions check out our Twitter input help page

What is Twitter?

Twitter.com is the wildly popular micro-blogging service which allows people to answer one question very easily: “What are you doing?” in less then 140 characters. It is a great way to keep in contact with friends, family and also find out what other people are up to via Web, IM, SMS and Desktop applications.

For more info on Twitter go to Twitter.com and Twitter.com/faq

We’ll be rolling out a few small features soon. Here are a few notables:

• Added calendar based date selection in the sidebar
• Today and Yesterday links will always take you there based on your timezone
• Messaging has been slightly tweaked for quicker reading and replying
• Added carb averages per meal per day for premium users
• More intuitive date labeling for multi-day statistics
• dozens of other small bug fixes

Twitter.com and SugarStats.com Integration!

Another cool thing is Twitter integration, now you can input sugar and med entries directly from Twitter via the twitter website, SMS, IM, within Firefox and all the other great 3rd party Twitter utilities. Find the full details on our Twitter help page.

Email Input Format Modification

An important thing to mention is we’ve standardized the input format quite a bit so now inputting via Twitter and Email takes exactly the same format. Before you had a separate med email you had to specifically send mail to, now you just have one but you have to slightly modify the format of the entry.

Learn more on our email Input help page

As a means to provide as many ways to easily input information we’ve launch SugarStats Mobile Edition so you can easily input your statistics on the go.

We’ve built a very simplified mobile version for use on phones and PDA’s which have browsers that support HTML/XHTML.

All you have to do is open your mobile browser and go to http://m.sugarstats.com and login. To avoid excessive logging out you might want to select “remember me” on the login page.

Features:

We’re continually making new changes and additions but for now we’ve gone some basic functionality in place:

• Adding Sugars and Meds along with Foods and Activities if you have a premium account
• Deleting entries and notes
• Adding comments to those entries
• View entries for any day
• Add personal notes for any day
• Last 7 and 30 days trends and averages
• Browse to specific day

SugarStats Mobile Requirements:

1. Your phone’s browser needs to be HTML/XHTML compliant, this isn’t a WAP portal. A good test is to go to http://www.google.com/xhtml on your mobile phone and see if it works.
2. Your mobile browser needs to be able to handle cookies. You can find this in your browser settings and it is usually set by default
3. If you have a premium account your mobile browser needs to support SSL encryption.

Mobile Browser Recommendations:

Opera Mini:

We highly recommend those without Windows Mobile or Symbian devices to use Opera Mini as their web browser. It is just a fantastic mobile browser with great support and it runs on pretty much any device that supports Java.

You can find it here: http://www.operamini.com/ or you can download it directly by opening http://operamini.com on your mobile browser.

Minimo:

Another browser option for Windows Mobile 5 and above devices only is the Minimo project from the Mozilla foundation. Find more info here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/

Support

If you have any problems, requests, feedback or questions feel free to let us know: support@sugarstats.com

Khurt over at Honey Sweet posted a great review regarding his experience with SugarStats so far:

“SugarStats.com is a welcome addition to my overall diabetes management strategy. I can only imagine the wonderfully useful things that Marston and his team are working on.”

Well, we’ve officially been launched for a month now! We wanted to share some overall stats of the system, how we’re doing and a tiny bit of the great stuff to come If you haven’t already don’t forget to get your own account free.

We got hit and continue to get hit with loads of traffic but we’re happy to say things are holding up great.

We’ve gotten great response in these first 4 weeks of launch that have helped us greatly improve the system. Within just the first few days alone we had hundreds of new users sign up and thanks to people seeing the value of the system and spreading the word virally this trend is still happening.

First 30 Day Stats

Within the first 4 weeks of launch:

Sugar Readings

• Over 17,500 Sugar Entries Recorded.
• Averaging 147 mg/dL and 9.2 mmol/L respectively

Top 5 Meds:

1. Lantus
2. Humalog
3. Novalog
4. Metformin
5. NovoRapid

Foods

While only premium members can track food/carbs, plenty of food/carb tracking going on:

• Some of you LOVE yogurt, popcorn, peanut butter, orange juice and milk
• Over 2850 meals have been eaten via over 750 different foods
• Over 85,100g grams of carbs consumed
• Avg carbs per food entry: 134g
• Avg carbs per meal: 29g

Before and After Meal Sugar Readings

Before you ask, yes these types of graphs and trends will be making their way into your own SugarStats account. So you premium users can look forward to an even greater look into how your meals affect your blood sugars.

Overall Averages:

• Before Breakfast: 143 mg/dL
• After Breakfast: 154 mg/dL
• Before Lunch: 141 mg/dL
• After Lunch: 150 mg/dL
• Before Dinner: 151 mg/dL
• After Dinner: 158 mg/dL

Activities

Another premium only feature but very important to keep track of:

1. Over 6200 minutes of physical activity tracked. Over 103 hours.
2. Over 206 minutes per day (3.4 hours)

Some of your favorite exercises include:

1. Walking
2. Swimming (one of my favs)
3. Dancing
4. Yoga

Overall Averages (in mg/dL):

• Before Activity: 147
• After Activity: 150

What’s to come

Besides the few that really want to track everything in detail, we’ve gotten absolutely great response from you guys. You’ve told us you love how simple and easy to use the system is. This is great to hear as that is what it was built for, so the average diabetic will actually WANT to use it and then actually be able to understand the statistics.

Even so there are plenty of places we can improve on and you’re helping greatly with that. While we won’t go into detail on our future plans (gotta keep some excitement huh? ), we’re working on some really cool stuff. We’ll give a few little hints:

• Would you like to share your stats (on your blog etc) for all to see your progress?
• Think your mobile phone/PDA browser could be more useful for adding entries?
• Would you like to add friends within SugarStats to see their stats and create a support system?
• Do you use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc?
• Want to show your people better and more informative graphs? (especially for premium users)

Ok ok, thats enough for now. We don’t have dates for specific features but there is plenty of exciting stuff going on over here So don’t forget to create your free account.

Finally, THANK YOU

And finally a big thanks to all our users and BETA testers who have helped craft the site and application. Your support and feedback has been tremendous and we really appreciate all of it. Stay tuned because there is more to come for sure!