No, I haven’t seen Dexcom’s candlestick chart. I’ll have to take a look at it.

I’ve used a few different programs for tracking and charting blood glucose readings, but nothing was as flexible as I wanted. I didn’t like being tied to one vendor’s tools, and some of the products had significant workflow issues.

I’m hoping to take many of the better features from various vendor apps and fold them into my self-management program. (For example, a “metabolic control” chart already appears as part of the report generator output.)

As anyone with diabetes knows, one of the best things you can do is keep a log book. The act of keeping track of readings and activities helps with fine-tuning and noticing when something needs a change. And an annotated log book is very useful in explaining readings that might otherwise seem rather mysterious or that you want to revisit the next time that a similar event comes around (e.g., exercise, basal tests, particular meals, etc.).

So I’m building both notes and searchable keyword tagging into my app from the ground up. They’re not required fields, of course, just useful.

I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing with this personal project, although I’m pretty sure that I want to make it available for other people to use.

Now that’s cool. Have you seen the candlestick chart from the Dexcom software?