Posted inInformation Technology / Investing

The Sad State of LifeScan and Bayer

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

I must give a nod to the post and title I’m ripping off: The Sad State of Diabetes Technology in 2012. It has been almost a year and not much has changed. Well actually, the things which have changed should have made the required course of action completely obvious. Microsoft canned the head of Windows. (Okay, he “left” two weeks after Windows 8 came out with no prior warning or hint from the company, no matter how you want to spin it that looks like canned to an outsider.) Now they appear to be bouncing Steve Ballmer’s bootie across the corporate parking lot. Windows 95 left a crater we could hide the moon in. Windows ME left one large enough to hide Mars in. Windows Vista left a crater we could hide Jupiter in and Windows 8 appears to be making a crater large enough to hide the Milkyway in. These are just some of the “successful” products Microsoft has brought to market. Microsoft Bob, Windows Watch, Zune, Microsoft Money and probably others which spasmed and died before the ink dried on the first set of marketing brochures.

Years ago the motto among Qt and Java developers was “Professionals don’t do Windows”. Now that motto is IT wide and for good reason. To anyone with enough intelligence to tie their own shoes it is obvious Microsoft is abandoning the PC. Oh, I fully expect them to whore off Microsoft mice and keyboards to Lenovo like IBM did with their PC business, but new versions of Windows and Windows based software are simply going to stop. Microsoft has been easing its way out of the PC market (and the constant lawsuits due mostly to mismanagement) for some time now. Most people don’t realize how many other businesses they are involved in. Did you know they have a stake in Barnes & Noble on-line? How about all of the cloud services they are now trying to sell? You have to have seen all of the Xbox commercials, assuming you don’t have a game player at home wanting one.

 

Why am I spending so much time talking about Microsoft in a post with a title about LifeScan and Bayer? Because you need to understand just how often upper management at both of these companies were dropped on their heads as children. It is the only explanation I can come up with. Both of these companies make diabetes test equipment which has the ability to store results history. Both of these companies have been badgered since before 2002 to make this data accessible by Linux and Mac. Both of these companies continue to provide Windows only software despite its ever shrinking market. Both have left the expansive smartphone market (which runs Linux/Droid/Apple for the most part) to other companies.

 

Users have been left to fend for themselves. Ubuntu users have been using USB scanners and rolling their own. There has been a SourceForge project for quite some time. Other projects and groups have also attempted to solve what is a massive problem in the diabetes world. Adding insult to injury is the fact both of these companies are most likely using data and results from the Rosetta project. Linux users are good enough to cruch the numbers for free, but not good enough to be considered when it comes to product design.

To understand just how often these people were dropped on their heads as children you have to have a tiny bit of consumer electronics knowledge. If you are able to read this post you most likely have more than enough knowledge. There is no reason to require custom cables or software. None. If you read through some of the links you will see Bayer was queried many times. People even offered to write the software for free. When I queried LifeScan I was told much the same thing.

 

We do not currently offer a non-Windows based software option, and we do not have information to provide at this time regarding current product developments.Due to ongoing testing and regulation compliance, LifeScan cannot provide information regarding product developments or plans prior to public release. This includes information regarding possible delays in release that may occur during the testing and compliance phases which is why we do not typically provide expected release dates. 

 

Let me state it again. There is absolutely no reason to require custom software or cables. None.

 

There are two industry standard methods of solving this problem without caring one iota about which operating system needs the information.

 

  1. Have your tester declare a portion of its storage as ReadOnly and store copies of history there in CSV (Comma Separated Value) format. When the USB cable connects to a computer have your device report itself as a ReadOnly flash/thumb drive. Every computer with a USB port can recognize a flash drive. Every free and commercial spreadsheet application can import a CSV file. Most database products can as well. Just be sure to use UTF-8 character encoding and all is well.
  2. Provide an actual, not a micro but a full sized USB port on the device. Let your operating system recognize a flash/thumb drive when connected (like every Linux/Windows/Apple/Droid OS currently can) and provide a menu option to export results history in CSV format.

 

That’s it. Two simple solutions based on industry standards. They should have little to no FDA impact since these are data export features (when properly implemented.) They do not change how your device currently tests, they simply provide data export.

 

Some reports state diabetes effects 8% of the population. One thing is certain, buckets of money are being thrown into drug and product research looking for “the next big thing.” This simple change to an existing product is “the next big thing”. Smartphone, Apple, and Linux users all want access to the data. That is currently most of the market. Even if they have a Windows based PC most smartphone users only use it to file taxes and write the occasional document.

 

Here is what will happen to both LifeScan and Bayer. A Chinese (or Korean) company is going to knock-off one of their testers. The knock-off will provide the data in industry standard CSV format. News about this new Linux/Apple/anything compatible tester will spread like a Colorado wild fire across the blog-o-sphere. In a few short months it will become the best selling test device out there and all of that money these two companies were making from test strip and lancet sales will vaporize.

 

Anyone who owns a computer has either purchased or been given a thumb drive. We all know how to use them. There are hundreds if not thousands of Web pages, not to mention built in application help informing the uneducated about how to import a CSV file into a spreadsheet. This outcome requires no new technology to be invented. The current crop of test devices are probably already running some flavor of embedded Linux. The bit-bake version already has USB and thumb drive support modules which I’ve used before on projects. You just have to add them to your build script.

 

If I had any shares of either company I would be dumping them. They are about to lose a huge chunk of their diabetes revenue. The time to market for adding the ReadOnly solution to an existing tester can’t be more than six months.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.