Recent Posts by marke - DAFNE Online

Jul 20, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / Good carb counting resource?

hi, DAFNE and DAFNEOnline are two separate things. I can give a personal point of view from DAFNEOnline and I'm sure Simon will say if he disagrees with me. As far as DAFNE goes you would need to ask them at www,dafne,uk.com.
So my view is DAFNEOnline is a graduate run website for graduates and so we give up all our time and effort free of charge to help other graduates. Carbs and Cals is a charged for service that I assume is run to make a profit. I am not keen on charging people for things that I believe should be provided for free by either the NHS or us. I'm not even happy about graduates having to pay for paper diaries from the website above, but there is nothing I can do about it.
I'm not sure DAFNEOnline should be providing a free service to an app that is charged for. I think if you want this added to the app you should request it from the developers. If they want to do this that's fine, we are happy for people to use any service they find gives them the best facilities.DAFNEOnline will always be free.

Jul 19, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / Good carb counting resource?

Hi, I'm curious which area you are in as its a requirement of all CCG's and Trusts to provide Diabetes Education. It is part of what they are assessed on and what they get paid for. If they are not providing it then that is an issue, however it maybe people not telling you the whole truth as its easier fir them not to refer you.

Jun 18, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / Background Insulin Update

The following link contains an update from the DAFNE Executive Team on Background Insulin's and DAFNE. You can find it here : BackgroundInsulininDAFNE.pdf
Apologies if it is too technical I did try to get the to get them to put it in 'user' terms and it is more straight forward then is was !

May 23, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / Important DAFNE question

All, Simon and I are going to be doing a workshop on DAFNE Online at this years DAFNE Collaborative ( a conference for all DAFNE Educators). As part of it
we want to find out about HCP contributions to the site and the barriers for doing so. Related to this we agreed we would run a little survey to get your opinions so
that we can present these to the educators that come to the workshop. So as many answers as possible please Smile

Does your HCP use DAFNE Online ?

Do you think HCP's should be involved in/contribute to DAFNE Online or should it graduate led ?

What other apps / social media do you use / find useful with relation to your Diabetes ?

May 9, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / Basal Correction

Hi, I think you will need to provide us with more information. When do you inject your background insulin and what dose do you take. Do you inject your
background insulin one or twice a day. Also one high reading is not necessarily a problem does it happen every day ? This is why the key to DAFNE is recording
your BG before every meal and looking for patterns.
Welcome to the site by the way, its good to have graduates posting from Singapore Smile

Apr 13, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / Stem Cell Research

We have received the following request, which maybe you can help with !!

I am a final year Biology undergraduate at Edinburgh University, currently doing a project to evaluate the fact sheets about stem cell research on the website www.eurostemcell.org.
One of the fact sheets is about how stem cell science could help Type 1 diabetes in the future, so I would be really interested to get feedback from people with Type 1 diabetes and their family and friends.
Would you be willing to circulate my survey around your members? It only takes about 15 minutes and all respondents can enter a prize draw to win a Â£100 Amazon voucher. The deadline for entering is 24/4/14.

Here is the link:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/factsheet_evaluation

Apr 7, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / Moderate changes, retinopathy

Hi, I would be more concerned that the advice you were given. Sorry but its not clear where you did DAFNE and who provides your Diabetes care. I am lucky in that my eye screening is reviewed by my consultant, I got a letter about changes in my eyes but he explained everything properly and in my case there were no real changes. You should be getting advice about this from a Diabetes expert who knows the full details about retinopathy, including how it develops and how it can be treated. It CAN be treated and given you obviously ARE taking it seriously then it really should not be a major problem. There are no guarantees in life about anything but if you control your HbA1c there really shouldn't be any reason to be worried Smile

To often we are told all the bad things but not given the whole picture. The reason for eye screening is to pick up issues early and treat them, just because you have started to develop a degree of retinopathy it doesn't mean you will go blind and indeed it will necessarily get worse. Keep positive and work on your control, if you struggle with this, ask questions on here or other Diabetes websites, also if in the UK talk to diabetes UK.

Mar 10, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: DAFNE Online Mobile / Android App - Correction for high BG

Hi, there ARE differences but I'm not 100% sure what they are. Basically the iPhone app is still being developed and updated by Simon. However Keith no longer has time to develop/update the Android App so its falling behind the iPhone version. The auto-correction has only ever been implemented on the iPhone as far as I know ( I use an iPhone not an Android). Until we can find someone else to develop the Android App nothing much will change unfortunately. Both were developed by individuals in their own time and are not professionally funded.

Feb 25, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: Site Development / CSV export

Hi, Phil is correct I'm not sure it would be simple to process the field as part of the export because of the 'free form' entry of the data. However as you say manipulation in excel is possible. One tip that will stop excel 'interpreting' the file is to rename it so it ends in '.txt' rather than '.csv', why ? well as Phil noticed excel tries to be clever because it thinks it understands csv files, if you rename the file as a txt file and then open it in excel you can then tell it to interpret the file data as csv, however it also allows you to define what is in each field i.e tell it the QA is a text field NOT a date field or a value field. Once you have the QA field as text there are a number of text manipulation functions that allow you to split the data assuming you have been consistent in using no spaces between the '-' and '+' or have always used spaces between them. I will have a think about the best formulas to use in excel and post them here if I can come up with something that works Smile

Jan 21, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / Glucose monitoring contact lenses

novorapidboi26 said:
I think at this early stage the lens can only alert the user to a low glucose level.

As far as glucose level management and monitoring goes its not there yet.......

I would prefer some kind of implant though......

I want a bionic hand like Douglas Renholm, but I guess the IT Crowd is not real Laughing

(to most of you anyway)

Jan 19, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / My Blood Glucose Diary - problems

Hi, before I take all the glory I should point out that both Simon and I have been working on the problem and both probably contributed to the solution.

For the technically minded, a brief explanation. The website runs on top of a database, which is basically a place to store information. This was where the cause of the problem lay. The number of diary entries had reached such a level that reading them to display on the site was taking too long. This is partly because everyone's diary entries are stored together. The site knows who you are from your login and only reads your entries from the very long list. What we had to do was speed up the reading of the list. Simon changed the way it was read and I added things called indexes. Just like a book index, a database index helps you to find the information you want quicker. The two things together seem to have got things back to a reasonable speed. This stops the 'something went wrong' error because the web page gets the diary entries back quick enough and doesn't timeout presuming the entries are not coming.

It took a while to fix because it wasn't obvious initially what the problem was and then we needed to test any changes before making them live just in case.
thank you everyone for your patience.

Jan 17, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / My Blood Glucose Diary - problems

Hi, We have made some progress and hopefully will be able to test some fixes over the weekend. We obviously need to be careful, its one thing it being slow its another to kill it completely Embarassed

Jan 15, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: Site Development / Ios app not syncing diary

Hi, looking at the logs you ARE updating diary entries on the site and I can see loads of entries created in the last few days. I suspect the issue is you app is uploading lots of entries and we seem to have a performance issue with the site at the moment. The app is probably not getting a response quick enough and thinks it has lost connection when its just slow. Hopefully we will soon work out what the performance issue is.

Jan 14, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: DAFNE Online Mobile / Problems uploading

Hi, the following entry looks a bit strange:

2014-1-11 at 19:26 diary_entry_type= Before Dinner, ratio=2.5:1, bg="", cps="5.5", qa="13.8", bi=""
There is no BG but the QA is 13.8 which looks odd. Should this be in the BG field ??
This may explain the error you are getting, can you change it and see what happens ?

Jan 13, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: DAFNE Online Mobile / Problems uploading

Hi, there is NO app design team. In fact there is no android developer at all at the moment. This site is run on a voluntary basis by DAFNE Graduates in their spare time. The apps were developed by people kind enough to give their time. This is why questions are not being answered at the moment. In addition there is an issue in the diary part of the site that 'may' be related to this. Can you please provide details of what the errors are and the date and time they appear, this will help is investigate the issue and hopefully provide a solution.

Jan 13, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / My Blood Glucose Diary - problems

Hi, Yes we have not resolved the issues at the moment. We are still trying to work out what the problem is, it works fine in our test setup but not on the live site for some reason. I WILL post on this thread as soon as there are any developments.

Jan 9, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / My Blood Glucose Diary - problems

Hi, yes there is a problem, but sorry no don't know what it is yet Embarassed

Jan 9, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / reliable metre readings

Hi you are entitled to think I am being difficult and not answering a simple question just as I am entitled to think you are not going to listen to what I say. Therefore I won't comment further since it won't benefit anyone for us to argue over medical technology.

Jan 3, 2014

marke 657 posts

Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / reliable metre readings

Sorry but I don't know where you get your information. Firstly why do you think more and more products are being manufactured in China and why is this a bad thing ? Secondly why do you think your meters will be highly accurate ? A blood test using a home meter is a best guess its NOT a foolproof accurate reading. Firstly it is carried out in a completely uncontrolled environment with a number of varying inputs. For a start test strips only have to be within 15-20% of the 'real' Blood Glucose value, then you are potentially extracting blood onto a contaminated surface ( your skin), lastly the test strips may have been kept in an environment were the temperature varies wildly. All of these factors can create an inaccurate reading.
I agree it should NOT vary from 6.8 to 17 or 13 that is concerning, however did you use the same sample of blood for each test ? If not other factors could be affecting the result.
I'm not being deliberately difficult here, just trying to point out that you are expecting too much from a technology that will never be able to deliver it. Perhaps once/if we have embedded BG sensors that measure your blood sugar continuously, internally but I suspect this technology is a few years away yet.

Dec 10, 2013

marke 657 posts

Topic: Site Development / Diary Sync?

The app will only upload entries when you add a new entry. If you created the entries before you put your login details into the app or set Diary Upload it won't
have uploaded them. The reason it works this way is the alternative is the app would have to run in the background constantly checking if it needed to upload entries to the site. This would be inefficient and would flatten your battery. If you add a new entry the app knows there is at least one entry to upload and so will try to upload it and any entries that have not been uploaded. Also, stating the obvious, you need to have an internet connection when you add the entry. If you are not on wifi or don't have data coverage when out and about it can't upload the entry anyway.

Oct 9, 2013

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / Milking fingers causes low BG readings

my understanding and it could be wrong, is that if you squeeze the blood out you could also squeeze out subcutaneous matter that affects the reading. This is why they say don't milk...
That said I too do it, its one of those things that the medical profession think patients don't do, that in reality they do all the time Laughing

Oct 6, 2013

marke 657 posts

Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / Dominoes

There is a link to the Dominos carb data in our carb content list here

Oct 6, 2013

marke 657 posts

Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / carbs and cal iphone app

I should probably point out that this site also has a carb content list here, which any additions would also be most welcome Laughing

Oct 3, 2013

marke 657 posts

Topic: General Discussion / eye scan

i would agree its nothing to worry about but I also agree the letters are very poor in the extreme. I got one and the next time I saw my consultant before I even asked he had got the scans on the screen because he knew I would ask. He showed me the 'issue' found had been there for years and was infact a minor issue with my retina that had always been there and was not caused by Diabetes. He said it was an over zealous checker.
I think this letter is completely pointless in that generally unless the condition worsens they will take no action and will wait a year before checking again. Its always a good idea to keep your BG in range if possible to avoid all complications not just retinopathy.

Sep 3, 2013

marke 657 posts

Topic: Questions ? / Lyndoran25

Hi, can you please read the help on sharing your BG Diary or email us using the 'Contact DAFNE Online' link at the bottom of each page. Thank you Very Happy

Jul 20, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / Good carb counting resource? hi, DAFNE and DAFNEOnline are two separate things. I can give a personal point of view from DAFNEOnline and I'm sure Simon will say if he disagrees with me. As far as DAFNE goes you would need to ask them at www,dafne,uk.com. So my view is DAFNEOnline is a graduate run website for graduates and so we give up all our time and effort free of charge to help other graduates. Carbs and Cals is a charged for service that I assume is run to make a profit. I am not keen on charging people for things that I believe should be provided for free by either the NHS or us. I'm not even happy about graduates having to pay for paper diaries from the website above, but there is nothing I can do about it. I'm not sure DAFNEOnline should be providing a free service to an app that is charged for. I think if you want this added to the app you should request it from the developers. If they want to do this that's fine, we are happy for people to use any service they find gives them the best facilities.DAFNEOnline will always be free.

Jul 19, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / Good carb counting resource? Hi, I'm curious which area you are in as its a requirement of all CCG's and Trusts to provide Diabetes Education. It is part of what they are assessed on and what they get paid for. If they are not providing it then that is an issue, however it maybe people not telling you the whole truth as its easier fir them not to refer you.

Jun 18, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / Background Insulin Update The following link contains an update from the DAFNE Executive Team on Background Insulin's and DAFNE. You can find it here : BackgroundInsulininDAFNE.pdf Apologies if it is too technical I did try to get the to get them to put it in 'user' terms and it is more straight forward then is was !

May 23, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / Important DAFNE question All, Simon and I are going to be doing a workshop on DAFNE Online at this years DAFNE Collaborative ( a conference for all DAFNE Educators). As part of it we want to find out about HCP contributions to the site and the barriers for doing so. Related to this we agreed we would run a little survey to get your opinions so that we can present these to the educators that come to the workshop. So as many answers as possible please Does your HCP use DAFNE Online ? Do you think HCP's should be involved in/contribute to DAFNE Online or should it graduate led ? What other apps / social media do you use / find useful with relation to your Diabetes ?

May 9, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / Basal Correction Hi, I think you will need to provide us with more information. When do you inject your background insulin and what dose do you take. Do you inject your background insulin one or twice a day. Also one high reading is not necessarily a problem does it happen every day ? This is why the key to DAFNE is recording your BG before every meal and looking for patterns. Welcome to the site by the way, its good to have graduates posting from Singapore

Apr 13, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / Stem Cell Research We have received the following request, which maybe you can help with !! I am a final year Biology undergraduate at Edinburgh University, currently doing a project to evaluate the fact sheets about stem cell research on the website www.eurostemcell.org. One of the fact sheets is about how stem cell science could help Type 1 diabetes in the future, so I would be really interested to get feedback from people with Type 1 diabetes and their family and friends. Would you be willing to circulate my survey around your members? It only takes about 15 minutes and all respondents can enter a prize draw to win a Â£100 Amazon voucher. The deadline for entering is 24/4/14. Here is the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/factsheet_evaluation

Apr 7, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / Moderate changes, retinopathy Hi, I would be more concerned that the advice you were given. Sorry but its not clear where you did DAFNE and who provides your Diabetes care. I am lucky in that my eye screening is reviewed by my consultant, I got a letter about changes in my eyes but he explained everything properly and in my case there were no real changes. You should be getting advice about this from a Diabetes expert who knows the full details about retinopathy, including how it develops and how it can be treated. It CAN be treated and given you obviously ARE taking it seriously then it really should not be a major problem. There are no guarantees in life about anything but if you control your HbA1c there really shouldn't be any reason to be worried To often we are told all the bad things but not given the whole picture. The reason for eye screening is to pick up issues early and treat them, just because you have started to develop a degree of retinopathy it doesn't mean you will go blind and indeed it will necessarily get worse. Keep positive and work on your control, if you struggle with this, ask questions on here or other Diabetes websites, also if in the UK talk to diabetes UK.

Mar 10, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: DAFNE Online Mobile / Android App - Correction for high BG Hi, there ARE differences but I'm not 100% sure what they are. Basically the iPhone app is still being developed and updated by Simon. However Keith no longer has time to develop/update the Android App so its falling behind the iPhone version. The auto-correction has only ever been implemented on the iPhone as far as I know ( I use an iPhone not an Android). Until we can find someone else to develop the Android App nothing much will change unfortunately. Both were developed by individuals in their own time and are not professionally funded.

Feb 25, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: Site Development / CSV export Hi, Phil is correct I'm not sure it would be simple to process the field as part of the export because of the 'free form' entry of the data. However as you say manipulation in excel is possible. One tip that will stop excel 'interpreting' the file is to rename it so it ends in '.txt' rather than '.csv', why ? well as Phil noticed excel tries to be clever because it thinks it understands csv files, if you rename the file as a txt file and then open it in excel you can then tell it to interpret the file data as csv, however it also allows you to define what is in each field i.e tell it the QA is a text field NOT a date field or a value field. Once you have the QA field as text there are a number of text manipulation functions that allow you to split the data assuming you have been consistent in using no spaces between the '-' and '+' or have always used spaces between them. I will have a think about the best formulas to use in excel and post them here if I can come up with something that works

Jan 21, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / Glucose monitoring contact lenses novorapidboi26 said: I think at this early stage the lens can only alert the user to a low glucose level. As far as glucose level management and monitoring goes its not there yet....... I would prefer some kind of implant though...... I want a bionic hand like Douglas Renholm, but I guess the IT Crowd is not real (to most of you anyway)

Jan 19, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / My Blood Glucose Diary - problems Hi, before I take all the glory I should point out that both Simon and I have been working on the problem and both probably contributed to the solution. For the technically minded, a brief explanation. The website runs on top of a database, which is basically a place to store information. This was where the cause of the problem lay. The number of diary entries had reached such a level that reading them to display on the site was taking too long. This is partly because everyone's diary entries are stored together. The site knows who you are from your login and only reads your entries from the very long list. What we had to do was speed up the reading of the list. Simon changed the way it was read and I added things called indexes. Just like a book index, a database index helps you to find the information you want quicker. The two things together seem to have got things back to a reasonable speed. This stops the 'something went wrong' error because the web page gets the diary entries back quick enough and doesn't timeout presuming the entries are not coming. It took a while to fix because it wasn't obvious initially what the problem was and then we needed to test any changes before making them live just in case. thank you everyone for your patience.

Jan 17, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / My Blood Glucose Diary - problems Hi, We have made some progress and hopefully will be able to test some fixes over the weekend. We obviously need to be careful, its one thing it being slow its another to kill it completely

Jan 15, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: Site Development / Ios app not syncing diary Hi, looking at the logs you ARE updating diary entries on the site and I can see loads of entries created in the last few days. I suspect the issue is you app is uploading lots of entries and we seem to have a performance issue with the site at the moment. The app is probably not getting a response quick enough and thinks it has lost connection when its just slow. Hopefully we will soon work out what the performance issue is.

Jan 14, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: DAFNE Online Mobile / Problems uploading Hi, the following entry looks a bit strange: 2014-1-11 at 19:26 diary_entry_type= Before Dinner, ratio=2.5:1, bg="", cps="5.5", qa="13.8", bi="" There is no BG but the QA is 13.8 which looks odd. Should this be in the BG field ?? This may explain the error you are getting, can you change it and see what happens ?

Jan 13, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: DAFNE Online Mobile / Problems uploading Hi, there is NO app design team. In fact there is no android developer at all at the moment. This site is run on a voluntary basis by DAFNE Graduates in their spare time. The apps were developed by people kind enough to give their time. This is why questions are not being answered at the moment. In addition there is an issue in the diary part of the site that 'may' be related to this. Can you please provide details of what the errors are and the date and time they appear, this will help is investigate the issue and hopefully provide a solution.

Jan 13, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / My Blood Glucose Diary - problems Hi, Yes we have not resolved the issues at the moment. We are still trying to work out what the problem is, it works fine in our test setup but not on the live site for some reason. I WILL post on this thread as soon as there are any developments.

Jan 9, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / My Blood Glucose Diary - problems Hi, yes there is a problem, but sorry no don't know what it is yet

Jan 9, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / reliable metre readings Hi you are entitled to think I am being difficult and not answering a simple question just as I am entitled to think you are not going to listen to what I say. Therefore I won't comment further since it won't benefit anyone for us to argue over medical technology.

Jan 3, 2014 marke 657 posts	Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / reliable metre readings Sorry but I don't know where you get your information. Firstly why do you think more and more products are being manufactured in China and why is this a bad thing ? Secondly why do you think your meters will be highly accurate ? A blood test using a home meter is a best guess its NOT a foolproof accurate reading. Firstly it is carried out in a completely uncontrolled environment with a number of varying inputs. For a start test strips only have to be within 15-20% of the 'real' Blood Glucose value, then you are potentially extracting blood onto a contaminated surface ( your skin), lastly the test strips may have been kept in an environment were the temperature varies wildly. All of these factors can create an inaccurate reading. I agree it should NOT vary from 6.8 to 17 or 13 that is concerning, however did you use the same sample of blood for each test ? If not other factors could be affecting the result. I'm not being deliberately difficult here, just trying to point out that you are expecting too much from a technology that will never be able to deliver it. Perhaps once/if we have embedded BG sensors that measure your blood sugar continuously, internally but I suspect this technology is a few years away yet.

Dec 10, 2013 marke 657 posts	Topic: Site Development / Diary Sync? The app will only upload entries when you add a new entry. If you created the entries before you put your login details into the app or set Diary Upload it won't have uploaded them. The reason it works this way is the alternative is the app would have to run in the background constantly checking if it needed to upload entries to the site. This would be inefficient and would flatten your battery. If you add a new entry the app knows there is at least one entry to upload and so will try to upload it and any entries that have not been uploaded. Also, stating the obvious, you need to have an internet connection when you add the entry. If you are not on wifi or don't have data coverage when out and about it can't upload the entry anyway.

Oct 9, 2013 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / Milking fingers causes low BG readings my understanding and it could be wrong, is that if you squeeze the blood out you could also squeeze out subcutaneous matter that affects the reading. This is why they say don't milk... That said I too do it, its one of those things that the medical profession think patients don't do, that in reality they do all the time

Oct 6, 2013 marke 657 posts	Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / Dominoes There is a link to the Dominos carb data in our carb content list here

Oct 6, 2013 marke 657 posts	Topic: Carbohydrate Counting / carbs and cal iphone app I should probably point out that this site also has a carb content list here, which any additions would also be most welcome

Oct 3, 2013 marke 657 posts	Topic: General Discussion / eye scan i would agree its nothing to worry about but I also agree the letters are very poor in the extreme. I got one and the next time I saw my consultant before I even asked he had got the scans on the screen because he knew I would ask. He showed me the 'issue' found had been there for years and was infact a minor issue with my retina that had always been there and was not caused by Diabetes. He said it was an over zealous checker. I think this letter is completely pointless in that generally unless the condition worsens they will take no action and will wait a year before checking again. Its always a good idea to keep your BG in range if possible to avoid all complications not just retinopathy.

Sep 3, 2013 marke 657 posts	Topic: Questions ? / Lyndoran25 Hi, can you please read the help on sharing your BG Diary or email us using the 'Contact DAFNE Online' link at the bottom of each page. Thank you