Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Getting the glucose number from the Dexcom


It's hard to see in the photo, but the watch is showing the same value as the Dexcom.  

Now to get the current glucose reading from the Dex.  There's a software package, Dexcom Studio that comes with the Dex for downloading data from the gadget.  Interestingly, it's all written in C#.  Poking around in a $500 medical device's undocumented code, though, is something I'm not going to post...

Need another, "easier" way to get these numbers...  Playing around with the Dexcom studio software shows that it will download all of the watches data to an XML file, bingo!  A little C# code, and liberal use of the "sendkeys" command, and I can open and close the studio, and dump an XML file every few minutes.



Now, I can easily parse the file and get the Glucose value.  Using the process from my last posting, I can get the number onto my watch.  Success!

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Don. Thanks for this interesting info... Very intriguing. Would you by chance be willing to do a guest-blog post for DiabetesMine.com? I'd love to have you share your own D-story, and all that led to this Dex Watch... And of course whatever you're willing to share about all this. Let me know. I'm pretty easy to find over at the 'Mine.

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  2. Would you be willing to share your hack/script for getting the Dexcom Studio software to auto-download the XML data files? (And are you really getting XML? I got XML out of the old software, but I only see the option to export tab-delimited .csv in the Studio upgrade...) I keep an old Windows netbook around solely for the purpose of downloading my Dexcom data, and I would love to automate the process because it's *tedious*...

    (My own Dexcom data hacking is here, just FYI: https://github.com/jebeck/iPancreas.)

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