Onederland Review: One Drop iPhone App

One Drop is the newest diabetes application for the iPhone (no word yet for android users) and it's currently free to download. Touted to be a helpful tool where one can store BGs, Food, Insulin Doses, and Exercise, and see them at a glance, I was excited! I'd tried Mysugr but found it wanting, and ever since I've been looking for an application that can truly store it all. (**Ahem** Diasend, that means you! If you could turn your website into an app I'd be loyal forever! )

User Friendliness:
One Drop gets an A for that. It's completely user friendly, with a helpful tutorial once you sign up, but even without it, the application is self explanatory, and it isn't too hard to figure it out on your own.

I loved the look of the "me" and "we" areas. Think of it like Facebook for Diabetes--the "me" portion is your own user page, while the "we" is your newsfeed for everyone else. I thought this was ingenious because at a glance I could see how others in One Drop were fairing and it instantly created a sense of community. It's hard to feel alone or isolated as you see others numbers.

T1 Diabetes Friendliness:
Here's where I'm going to be picky, because this app was made for both T1 and T2 users. I can see how for T2 users, this application is perfect, but as we all know, T1 needs differ--and this is just one more example of how both the medical and technological community fail to understand the differences.

• Insulin Logging: For T2s, the way this app logs insulin is great, but for T1 pumpers, this app fails to meet our needs. You have to manually put in your basal rates--and there's no way to do it for the whole day, or to program into it what your normal rates are. So you literally have to plug in you basal rate by hitting the "meds" button over and over again making 24 separate entries for each hours and you must do this each day....talk about time consuming! If you don't do it this way, but simply enter in your basal rate all at one time (like I normally use about 58 basal units through my omnipod a day), it registers you as using that all in one hour, and the flow chart gets off base, which defeats the whole point of the app--to give you an accurate view of your day.  This is a HUGE miss, and would be so simple to fix. For those on pens, this would still work for you well. 
• Meal Logging: For T2s who aren't religious in carb counting, this application is perfect. It has you take a picture of your food and say if your meal was "low, medium, or high" carb. However for T1s this is another HUGE miss. We have to be so careful about carb counting for insulin dosing purposes and there's no way to really put nutrition values in the meal portion, which is a miss for me. I'd still need to use an app like MyFitnessPal to accurately put in my nutrition values and carb counts.

All in all, this app gets a C for T1 Friendliness. It may be helpful to those still on pens, but for a pumper, it's a nightmare, and it's a great example of how the Diabetes world still tries to lump T1 and T2 together, without realizing the differences in treatment needs.

I hope that One Drop hears the T1 cry and fixes the things above because if they did, it would be a perfect application for the T1 community! Until then though, it's too hard to keep up with to be useful.