We didn't win DiabetesMine's 2009 Design Challenge, yet there's no question that we hit the mark in developing an online tool that anyone can use to determine the size of their insulin dosage anywhere they have Internet access.
We know this is the case thanks to the Scribd page where our official entry for the contest is posted. Specifically, we know this because of the portion of the page devoted to how Scribd users are finding their way to our contest entry.
Clicking the "Stats" tab, we find that anywhere from 0 to 8 Scribd users per day have been searching the online document storage/social media site seeking assistance in doing the math related to calculating insulin doses. That's remarkable since our contest entry, which was the only one concerned with this aspect of treating diabetes, has only recently been indexed by major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! Search. We also find it remarkable since most those who are treating their diabetes will already know the math they need to do to determine their correct dosage of insulin and would presumably be unlikely to be searching the Internet for how to do so.
Clearly, we have a long-tail opportunity here! That's why we've tweaked our original prototype design for our insulin dose calculation tool, which now allows users to adjust the number of points by which a single insulin dose may reduce their blood glucose levels, in addition to the basic math developed by Neal Bason, who developed the math behind Thorpe Products' Insulin Dose Calculator, a compact electronic calculator designed to do this diabetes math, to whom we owe thanks for providing the description of the math we used in our online insulin dose calculating application.
If you're seeking to calculate your own insulin dosage, we recommend that you compare the results from the method you use today to those you obtain from our tool for determining insulage dosages. Please replace the default data we've provided for the purpose of illustration with your own unique data, taking care to avoid any data entry errors. Provided you get results consistent with the method you use today, you can have confidence in the tool's results.
As for the entry that did win the contest, let's hope that it lives up to its promise of being an all-in-one mobile phone/glucose monitor/lancet/test-strip storage/pump controller/data logging application device (Ed. "What! They forgot a place to put the insulin?!" Hey, it may be in there somewhere!) It certainly will be interesting to see if a real product can evolve that keeps up with the pace of change around which mobile phone design has been changing.
As we've noted before, you can have the most brilliant idea ever, but whether or not it becomes a success, or the degree to which it does, all hinges on the execution.
We'll see if they can at least match our "losing" idea!
Labels: health, health care, ideas, tool
- posted by Ironman at 9:31 AM | Permalink | |
