I don’t know if this helps at all but there’s some ways to get a GCM from the private industry without needing a prescription, such as Nutrisense. I paid about $150 a month for it though.
To me, that's a lot of money for a piece of plastic. I get that it's a medical device and needed lots of testing etc, but Nutrisense seems like too much "value add" to justify what they charge for it. Hopefully I can get a prescription and get this all covered by insurance.
> To me, that's a lot of money for a piece of plastic
It’s a medical device with wireless electronics, a mechanism to insert a sensor filament into your skin as painlessly as possible, and a lot of R&D went into making it. It’s not just a “piece of plastic”
The companies charge overhead to have a doctor write a prescription. You can try to find someone who will sell you one from India or another country, but by the time you pay international shipping you’re not saving much.
Regardless, don’t expect it to be all that informative for your condition. If you’re having episodes of hypoglycemia with symptoms, you don’t need a device to tell you that. CGMs are most useful for conditions without overt symptoms, where you need a device to expose the subtle changes. If you’re having episodes, just log that.
> Hopefully I can get a prescription and get this all covered by insurance.
There is a near zero chance that insurance will cover a CGM for curiosity or for diagnostic purposes. If it’s not indicated for a condition and there aren’t significantly powered studies readily available, it’s not something insurance would be interested in.
If you aren't diabetic you could pay for something like Nutrisense or Levels to get enough monitors to cover about 2-3 months of activity, learn what triggers spikes, and then cut it. What you see in those three months is pretty much what you are going to see going forward unless you were to make a significant lifestyle change and stick to it (going to/from carnivore/omnivore/vegetarian, cutting out alcohol, etc...)
I used Levels for about 3 months and I saw the same thing over and over again, it was obvious when I was being good about my eating, it was obvious when I went out for happy hour. I learned a couple things, mix a little fat or protein in if you are consuming carbs to blunt the spike, the alert to "take a walk to blunt the spike" is never long enough unless you go for an hour or more. Another year or two of wearing it wouldn't change any of that.
Unless your PC says for your condition of X we are going to try and get your glucose level to never go past Y and see if it fixes it, a CGM for non diabetic people is something you can timebox to 3-ish months, get the data, and get out for under a $1000 one time investment.
The "disposable" electronics in these are also extremely interesting. They're cost-reducing the hell out of these devices. Even in the last few months, one vendor replaced a cheap chip (TI RF430) with even cheaper custom silicon. They are not standing still!
According to Wikipedia, first CGM was approved in 1999. That may be recent for medical devices I guess, but it still seems like they're charging a lot for 20+ year old tech...
CGMs have improved a ton in the past 20 years, becoming less intrusive and easier to use.
We pay a lot more than $150 for all sorts of tech that is far more than 20 years old. But if you could make it for $20 or $30/month, that would be a serious innovation and perhaps you should try to start an advanced medical device company.
It works quite well for Dutch (a relatively small language) both in speech recognition and responses. Well done! It’s a cool project. Lots of people here like to nitpick but I’m sure this wasn’t easy.
I value the insight of many that post here, so I would like to ask: isn't there any valuable application for blockchain tech? I realize BTC is imperfect, but blockchain itself is just a technology.
Being pretty young, everyone I know is involved in crypto in one way or another. I'm personally waiting on the sidelines, but there should be some beneficial middle ground between going all-in and completely discarding the tech.
Well, money is the biggest use-case of it all. If you don't care about inflation (solved via decentralization), then there's the use-case of verifyably programmable money (ethereum)
Another one that I find fascinating is immutability, things like https://opentimestamps.org/ (uses bitcoin's blockchain), it allows you to proof that X piece of information existed prior to time Y.
I know of 2 different paths of assumptions you need to verify that proof:
1. Somewhat trusting bitcoin block's timestamps and the immutability that proof of work provides to the chain of blocks
2. Having a higher bound estimate of your attacker's ability to generate proof of work, and then sum all the available proof of work (it is sequentially chained in the blockchain from the block's proof, till the latest block produced), and compute how much time the attacker needed to spend to fake that proof of work, and that's your proof of the minimum time that must have passed since X was conceived
Estonia uses a blockchain to act as an immutable way to store timestamped hashes of government data for security and verification purposes - they started building this a year before the Bitcoin whitepaper was released in fact. That's the only valuable use for blockchains I've seen.
> Is it really a better alternative to putting some bomb bay doors on a modern Boeing?
From what I've been told, the B52 has relatively low operating cost and can stay up in the air pretty much indefinitely by being refueled in air by KC-135s.
source: I was an air traffic controller in the US Air Force
I think the most insightful points were from those who actually mentioned that the capabilities the B52 requires are extremely different.
Mid air refueling, electronic warfare & military technology integration, speed in combat zone, integrity while under enemy fire.
They are are very different points than I ever imagined you would have to consider for a bomber.
The B52s gigantic wings make a ton more sense now. They're incredibly large so they produce vastly more lift/other specifications than required in case holes are shot in the bomber.
Lesson I've learnt today is listen more to the experts.
