In my last post, I gave some of my initial observations of the Android operating system, and how it relates to my cellphone smartphone as a personal-safety device. Now it's time to look at the potential of this device in the hands of some talented developers, and what it might be able to do for diabetes management.

I'm first beginning to wade through the Android/diabetes waters as I write this, so there's a good possibility that some of my wishlist items have already been created. (If you find them, please comment back!) To-date, I've found one comment thread in the "dLife Garage" forum and whatever a simple Google search is throwing at me.

A phone-based log is the best and simplest place to start -- but I want more than just a logbook. OnTrack Diabetes is a free logbook app developed by a person living with diabetes. It logs blood glucose, blood pressure and pulse, weight, meal times, and medications, and provides a number of graphical reports. While it does track carbs, you must calculate them and input them manually. Track 3 Diabetes planner appears to be more comprehensive, with an 80,00-food database and exercise tracking. It costs $6.99.

Android DMS appears to be a blood-glucose log that puts more emphasis on medical statistics such as height, weight, and HbA1c.

ABC of Diabetes is aimed at medical practitioners, providing in-depth information and treatment algorithms. It's price ($42.95 per year on a subscription basis) confirms its intended audience.

Goomedic suggests a few other applications:

• Food Street Diabetes (a healthy eating primer)
• Body Sugar (another logbook with food and exercise options)
• e-Diabetes Pro (advice on the non-medication, non-insulin side of trying to maintain steady blood glucose levels)
• Diabetes (a set of basic flash cards)
• Agile Diabetes (still another glucose logbook), and
• Diabetes Manager, which -- as it includes blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and general health as well as all the other standard log items -- may be the most comprehensive of all of these.

But the Android platform can do so much more than just logging our meals and our blood glucose levels. Here's a wish list of things I believe these devices could do, if we got someone to program it correctly:

• Before eating packaged foods, use the camera to scan the UPCs or ingredients labels. The smartphone should be able to pull up the nutritional information (either from a UPC database or by OCR'ing the written information), and -- if you dial in your serving size -- auto-calculate the carbs. If you can insert your carb ratios in the setup, it could also estimate your insulin requirements for that food, whilst logging it in your meals log.
• If you have a set carb ratio for insulin and tell an appropriate application how much of which insulin you are taking, it should be able to calculate from that scan how much of that food (and only that food) you can safely eat for that insulin dose. (It should be able to do the same based on a manually-researched food item.)
• At a restaurant, take a photo of your plate. Based on the curvature of the plate and distance from the lens (on autofocus cameras), the application should be able to calculate its surface area and volume -- and thereby, how much of each food is on your plate, and what the approximate carb count is.
• If you've logged a low or high blood glucose reading, alarm you in fifteen minutes (or a user-controllable time) to test again. (This would help many of us without continuous glucose monitors.)
• Integrate its data into the desktop or Web-based diabetes management program of your choice (e.g., Co-Pilot, One Touch, Health Engage, etc.)
• Accept and view export files from that diabetes management program so you don't have to lug your computer and a bunch of printouts to your doctor's office -- or perhaps better yet, dial up and interface with the system already being used by your doctor's office and send reports periodically by text, e-mail, or other Internet-based background connection.

Now, there are a number of issues that stand in the way of making a number of these wishes into realities. The biggest among these are the proprietary data formats used by meter manufacturers for both their monitors and their desktop-based software; however, this doesn't mean that a particular manufacturer couldn't develop a smartphone application for its own meters. At the American Diabetes Association's Scientific Sessions, Animas announced that is working on a version of its Ping insulin pump that uses one's Android smartphone as its controller. One regulatory hurdle they will have to overcome is the same one that's delayed Wavesense's introduction of its Bluetooth-enabled Jazz meter in the United States: that the use of an electronic device to control medical data provided through another, FDA-approved medical device, makes the controller device a de facto medical instrument, and thereby subject to FDA regulation. Add to this the difficulty in getting even relatively rough nutritional information from many restaurants and food vendors, and device integration through smartphones becomes a sticky, gooey, bloody regulatory mess.

Still, there's nothing that inspires many of us so much as a challenge, and there's little hope of making a wish come true if you don't tell anyone else what you're wishing for. That said, what are your wishes for smartphone applications, and on which platform do you want to see them appear?