Meter Activity Recongnition

For years I’ve recommended to the meter manufacturers that they include activity recognition in their testing options. Now some companies are beginning to do just that.

Does your blood glucose meter let you tease out or separate test results by fasting, post-meal, or post-exercise level? Only if it does that will your tracking software be able to make sense of your trends.

This important feature goes by several different names. These include activity recognition, activity and meal recognition, event coding, event labeling, and meal markers. All of these terms mean essentially the same thing – that you can track your blood glucose trends and make sense of them. Without this feature that’s essentially impossible.

At the recently concluded scientific sessions of the American Diabetes Association in Chicago I met with the manufacturer and U.S. distributor of the newest meter to offer activity recognition. The manufacturer is Infopia, and I met with Bryan Oh, president of the North America Region. The U.S. distributor is HMD BioMedical in Titusville, Florida, and I met with Aron Sowards, director of clinical operations, and Richard Austin, national sales manager.

Right now HMD BioMedical sells Infopia’s Eclipse as the GlucoLab. Its activity recognition includes four selections: fasting, before and after meals, and after exercise.

Bryan Oh told me that Infopia hopes to get Food and Drug Administration approval to sell its latest meter, the Evolution, in September. He said that it’s now available in Europe as the Prime 4G and in Asia as the Firetest.

This meter has better statistics for speed and blood glucose sample than any meters currently available. It takes just three seconds to return a result and just 0.3 microliters of blood. It is also autocoding and also includes activity recognition. Ms. Sowards and Mr. Austin told me that HMD BioMedical will sell the Evolution by that name after the FDA approves it here.

Besides these new meters, the only ones that I am aware of that offer activity recognition are two from LifeScan and one from Bayer. The LifeScan meters are the OneTouch Profile, which has what LifeScan calls event labeling, and the SureStep Pro, which the company calls event coding. However, LifeScan markets the SureStep Pro only for the “multi-patient setting.”

The Bayer meter is the Contour. It has meal markers with a post-meal test reminder alarm that can remind you to test 2 and one-half hours after you mark a meal.


It’s still amazing to me how much better blood glucose meters have become since I started testing less than 14 years ago. For me one of the joys of attending events like the ADA’s conference in Chicago last week is to see exciting new products like those that Infopia and HMD BioMedical are bringing to market.

This article is based on an earlier version of my article published by HealthCentral.