As I start this draft I’m in Shanghai (mainland China), for a work trip. I have visited Shanghai before, but this time I have some more random time around, and while I was browsing stores with a colleague also visiting the city, we ended up in a big (three, four stories) pharmacy. We would have left right away if it wasn’t that I noticed a big sign advertising a Countour by Bayer glucometer, and I decided to peek around.
I found indeed a whole floor dedicated to health hardware, including, but clearly not limited to, glucometers. It had a long series of Omron hardware, blood pressure measurements, thermometers, etc. And a few desks of glucometer, some from brands that are established and known in the West, and a few I never heard of.
I looked around for the prices, and the meters are more expensive than in Europe, but about on par with the US, between ¥150 and ¥400. I asked if any of the ones they had that I did not recognize would allow downloading to the computer, and they showed me one for ¥258 (around €35), branded Sannuo and manufactured by Sinocare. I decided to buy it for the sake of figuring out how things differ in China for diabetes.
Before getting to the device itself, a few words of the act of buying one. First of all, as it appears to be common in China, or at least in Shanghai, buying something is a bit of a trip around: you select what you want, they send you to the cashier, you pay, and then you go back to the clerk who you chose the item with. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to pay with card, and if you’re really lucky, they will accept yours. In this case the store accepted my Tesco Visa, but not my Revolut MasterCard, which means it probably costed me closer to €40, but it’s okay.
After I paid for the device, the clerks assisted me not only by giving me the box of the meter, but configuring it up, particularly date and time. You’d think this would be obvious to do (and it is) but one of the things that kept surprising me in Shanghai is that every time you buy something, the seller will configure it for you, and make sure it works at least to a point, the same was true when I bought a SIM card at the airport. They did not ask me to take blood there and then, but they showed me how to set up the date and time.
Finally, they gave me a box of two bottles of strips, told me there were two bottles in the box, and even warned me to use them one bottle at a time (valid warning for glucometers’ reactive strips). And just to make a point here: only one of the two clerks who assisted me spoke any English, and even she didn’t speak it very well. They still did quite a bit to make me understand and explain how to use it.
Now to go back to the meter itself, the €40 got me a fairly clunky meter, a box of lancets and 50 test strips, which declare themselves having a fairly wide range (from 1.1 mmol/l). In the box with the device came the usual (by now) carrying case, and a lancing device. The lancets appear to be “standard” or at least as close as that word as can possibly be used for lancets and lancing devices.
What became very obvious both on the box of the meter, and on the wall ads of all the other meters, is that China, like the UK and Ireland, use mmol/l measurement for blood sugar. I honestly thought that was just a UK (and Ireland, Australia) thing, but clearly it is much more common. Since I’m writing this before getting back to Europe, I cannot tell whether the meter uses this in the wire protocol or, like all the western meters, uses mg/dL internally.
The meter itself feels clunky and it’s fairly big, just shy of the size of an Accu-Chek Mobile. It uses two AAA batteries, and that has only three buttons: power and up/down arrows. The display is a monochrome LCD, but it also has two LEDs, red and green, to tell you whether you’re in range or not. Oh, and it speaks.
It felt funny when I arrived at the hotel and tried it with a blood sample (it seems consistent with the variation of other meters), and it started announcing… something. I don’t speak Chinese so I have not understood anything, I should probably start Google Translate next time I try it. Part of the reason why this feels funny is because it reminded me of the i-ching calculator from Dirk Gently: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul radio series, which was effectively a calculator that spoke the results out loud. I did not make much of a parallel until this, but it then reminded me of the devices in the taxis I took last year, too.
Unfortunately even though I’m now at home, I have not been able to start on the reverse engineering, because I can’t seem to get the device to work on my laptop. According to Linux, the device is not accepting the assigned address. I should wire it up to the proper logic analyzer for that.