Scott Hanselman documents a recent project: lighting up a Das Keyboard lights in relation to one’s glucose meter reading.
I’ve long blogged about the intersection of diabetes and technology. From the sad state of diabetes tech in 2012 to its recent promising resurgence, it’s clear that we are not waiting.
If you’re a Type 1 Diabetic using a CGM – a continuous glucose meter – you’ll want to set up Nightscout so you can have a REST API for your sugar. The CGM checks my blood sugar every 5 minutes, it hops via BLE over to my phone and then to the cloud. You’ll want your sugars stored in cloud storage that YOU control. CGM vendors have their own cloud, but we can easily bridge over to a MongoDB database.
He runs Nightscout in Azure and it has a REST API.
Diabetics need to manage our sugars at the least hour by hour and sometimes minute by minute. As such it’s super important that we have “glanceable displays.” That means anything at all that gives me a sense (a sixth sense, if you will) of how I’m doing.
That might be:
- Alexa, what’s my blood sugar?
- Adding sugar numbers and trends to your Git/PATH prompt in your shell
- An Arduino with an LCD
- A wall-mounted dakBoard Family Calendar in a shared space that also shows my blood sugar
I got a Das Keyboard 5Q recently – I first blogged about Das Keyboard in 2006! and noted that it’s got it’s own local REST API. I’m working on using their Das Keyboard Q software’s Applet API to light up just the top row of keys in response to my blood sugar changing. It’ll use their Node packages and JavaScript and run in the context of their software.
However, since the keyboard has a localhost REST API and so does my blood sugar, I busted out this silly little shell script. Add a cron job and my keyboard can turn from orange (low), to green, yellow, red (high) as my sugar changes. That provides a nice ambient notifier of how my sugars are doing.
More information is in this blog post along with code in GitHub.
You can see videos of the project in action via this Twitter thread.