Two weeks ago I reviewed a GlucoRx Q meter, and while I was doing that I ended up down a rabbithole that I did not expect. The GlucoRx Nexus and Q are both manufactured by the same company, TaiDoc Technology – a Taiwanese medical device manufacturer that manufacturers and sells both personal medical devices such as glucometers and hospital equipment. They clearly manufacture “white label” meters, given that the Nexus (TD-4277) is available under a number of different brands and names — and in particular when looking at that I found it as the “GlucoMen Nexus”.
The reason why that caught my eye is that it’s marketed by the Italian pharmaceutical company Menarini — and I’m Italian so I knew the name. So when I added the information on the Q, I thought I would go and look on whether they also sold that under the GlucoMen brand — they didn’t, but I found another rathole to look at.
It turns out that the GlucoMen brand in the UK is managed by a subsidiary of Menarini called A. Menarini Diagnostics, and they sell not just your usual blood-based glucometers, but also a CGM system (though from what I can see it’s similar to the Dexcom I didn’t like). They also allowed me to order a free meter (the GlucoMen Areo that I’m going to review here), together with the free USB cable to use with it to download the data to a computer.
The fact that this meter required a separate cable hinted me at the fact that it’s not just another TaiDoc rebrand — as I said in the previous post, TaiDoc is the first manufacturer that I find re-using their exact protocol across different devices, and that suggested me that any other modern model from them would also use the same, and since they are using a Silicon Labs 8051 platform with native USB, it sounded unlikely they would need a separate cable.
Indeed, when the meter arrived it was clear that it’s not a TaiDoc device — it’s very different and all the markings on it suggest that Menarini is manufacturing it themselves (though, also in Taiwan). And it’s… interesting.
The first thing that I noted is that the carrying pouch was significantly higher quality than I’m used to. No netting to hold stuff in, but instead a Velcro-held pouch, and enough space to hold their prickling pen with. And on the inside, in addition to the logo of the company, space to write (or attach a label of) name, phone number, address and email. This is the first time in all my years with diabetes that I see such a “posh” pouch. Which turned out not to be entirely too surprising once I noticed that the pouch has the logo of the Italian accessories designer/manufacturer Tucano.
Going instead to look at the meter, what came to my attention quickly is that this meter is the first non-Chinese meter I find that (allegedly) has a “touch free” ejection of the testing strips. The shape and construction of the device roughly reminds me of the basic Tamagotchi from my early teens — to the point that when I push the button to eject the strip I’m afraid I’m going to destroy the LCD panel in the front. Note that unlike the Chinese devices, that have a lever that physically push the strip out of the holder, in this meter the “Push” button only appears to “let go” of the strip, which you can tip into the trash, but does not physically dislodge it at all.
The cable sent to me is another of the common 2.5mm TRS serial adapters — this one using a Silicon Labs CP2104-compatible chip on board (probably in the mould of the USB plug). It plugs at the bottom of the device, in a fashion pretty much identical to the OneTouch Ultra2 devices. Not surprising given I think they were the most common in Italy back in the day.
In addition to the USB/serial connectivity, the device is meant to speak NFC to a phone. I have not figured out how that is supposed to work, to be honest. It seems to be meant mostly to integrate with their CGM solution, and since I don’t have one (and I’m not interested in testing it right now), I don’t expect I’ll figure that out any time soon. Also NFC snooping is not my cup of tea and I’ll gladly leave that to someone else who actually knows how to do that.
Aesthetics continue with the design of the testing strips, that are significantly larger than most other meters I have at hand right now (this is not always a bad thing — particularly for older people, larger strips are easier to use), with a very thin drop placement at the top, and a white front. I’m not trying to play the stereotype of “Italian company cares about style more than substance”, but I have seen enough glucometers by now to say that Menarini definitely had a designer go through this with an eye at fitting everything together.
In terms of usability, the device is pretty straightforward — the display is a standard LCD (so standard I’m sure I saw the same exact segments before), very bright and easily readable. The amount of blood needed in the strip is actually much smaller than you would expect, but also not as little as other meters I have used in the past. This became very apparent during the last of my reverse engineering streams, when I lost three (or four) strips to “Err3” (too little blood), and it reminded me of how many strips I used to lose to not having drawn enough blood when I started using a meter.
In terms of documentation and usability of the markers function there’s something to say there, too. The device supports one or none markers out of four: before meal, after meal, exercise and “check mark” — the check mark is documented in the manual as being pretty much a freeform option. The way you mark these is by pressing (not holding) the power button when you’re looking at the strip result — the manual says to hold the button until the marker flashes, but if you hold it for more than a split second it actually turns off the device, which is not what I expected.
In a strange turn of events, this is also the first meter I saw using a fish (and fish bones) to represent the before (and after) meal. Nearly everything else I have at hand uses an apple (and an apple core), since that’s fruit, and thus sugars. I don’t have an issue on the option per se, but I can imagine this does confuse people at times.
The software is… painfully complex. It seems designed more for medical professionals than home use, which probably explains why the cable is not included by default. It also supports most GlucoMen devices, though it appears to install a long list of drivers for USB-to-serial adapters, which suggests each cable comes with a different serial adapter.
I have actually fully reverse engineered the protocol, live on stream during my Cats Protection Pawsome Players week — you can see the live streams archived on YouTube, but I’ll also post (probably later on) a summary of my discovery. It’s fully supported now on glucometerutils tough. The interesting part there is that I found how the original software has a bug: it can only set the time some of the times, literally, because of the way it provides the checksum to the device. My implementation doesn’t suffer from that bug.