LifeScan’s customer service people are very efficient–they got back to me in just one day. After checking my personal information for 7 minutes, and then asking carefully about serial no of the blood sugar monitor and lot number of test strips, the first question they asked is, “what makes you want to test your blood sugar more than once?”

It is kind of funny, because at $1.5 per strip, I guess not many people can afford to do sanity checks like I did. Definitely not grandmas and grandpas who are on social security and medicare. And when your doctors/nurses/educators told you that you do need to test your blood sugar regularly and it is the best for you, who would doubt them? Even Mayo Clinic said so!

With all the fuzz about biosensing, and all the advance in technologies, when can we have a more reliable method for testing blood? That will be a real ‘disrupting’ innovation–one that will not only destabilize a 174 Billion a year existing industry, but also benefit hundreds of millions of people around the world, including many people you know and maybe even your own grandma!

By the way, even though Mayo Clinic’s website never mentions how inaccurate these blood sugar tests are, American Association of Diabetes Educators clearly have done some research work, and here are the results they have dug up.

Here is a summary: even though that FDA only requires the glucose meters to show results within -25% to 25% of the true values for 95% of the times, most of these monitors fail to meet the standards in independent studies though they do get approved by the FDA. That means, for a person with a blood sugar of 100, it only requires the readings to be in the range of (75, 125) and they still fail it.

There is a new ISO standard coming requiring the monitors to be in the range for 99%, and FDA refuses to adopt it.