Thursday, July 21, 2016

Pokemon GO observations

I've been experimenting with Pokémon GO on an iPhone 6+. It's fun to play.

* The maps are pretty darn accurate, especially the trails. I'm discovering trails I didn't know were there. 

* Considering that the developers want us to have the PoGo app open all the time, it would be nice, if we could use it to navigate our way somewhere, when we're walking. I use RunKeeper to track my walks with the dog. It records miles, geotags interesting photos I take along the way, and also connects with Lose It! to relay calories burned. Would be nice if this app could do that.

* It is unbelievably frustrating, when the game gets into a mode where it will no longer accept any kind of screen input. The only thing you can do is kill the app. This has happened a few times during each one of my walks. A related issue, is that PoGo restarts itself, after switching back from another app, probably because it needs more resources than are available, when the other app runs. It appears to be reliably repeatable, when activating the camera app, then switching back to PoGo. 

* After considerable time experimenting with Pokemon Go, it seems clear that the app doesn't know how to play well with other apps. It appears to suck up all available resources (probably memory). This causes other apps, that are attempting to run in the background, to run out of resources and fail, so that they have to restart when they are brought back to the foreground. An app like RunKeeper, that needs to capture position occasionally, is forced to stop, and can't do its tracking job, with no data. Update: A newer phone with more memory doesn't have this problem very often.



Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Managing blood glucose

There are so many useless, or marginally useful, apps out there, for blood glucose (BG) management.

I helped my wife try to manage her blood glucose for many years. We thought we had an idea of how things worked, but it was hard to find a decent app to help with BG management.

The old WaveSense app was a good start. It accepted time-stamped entries of blood glucose, food (carbs, fat, protein, calories), and short and long-term insulin. It had several weaknesses, including frequent crashes, taking forever to change time scales when a lot of data was present, mislabeling early morning activities as the next night.

My idea of a good / useful BG management app would include the following features:
  • Allow entry of blood glucose, food carbs/fat/protein calories, insulin, exercise calories, stress, alcohol. 
  • Graph the BG data with a choice of time scales ranging from a fraction of a day, to all data (years). Allow scrolling in time with any particular scale. 
  • Don't limit things based on some artificial sense of how the data might look. 
  • Realize that this app can be an extremely helpful tool, when several measurements are made just a few minutes apart, for example, when recovering from a serious low BG, and measuring every 15 minutes or less. 
  • Optionally show insulin and food doses graphically with the BG plot, as translucent up (for food) and down (for insulin) histogram bars or vertical arrows, with the magnitude of the bars calculated from the user-entered sensitivity numbers (BG/carb and BG/insulin unit). 
  • Optionally calculate recommended fast-acting insulin dose, based on the current BG entry, other recent BG entries that help establish a trend, recent food intake and insulin dose entries. 
  • Export all data, or a specified time range, to email. 

I'll update this, if I remember more details of what we thought would be helpful.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Live weather on route mapping

How about putting live weather radar and prognostic graphics (fronts) overlaying real-time route mapping. Aviation apps got this right immediately, because it's more of a "life depends on it" kind of thing. But it's really helpful, to have a sense of what weather is ahead, on long road trips too. Having options to show current weather and forecast weather along the planned route would be awesome for deciding about possible alternate routes.