What the Meter Doesn't Record for You

The meter reads 247. You dose 8 units of Humalog mix 75/25. You eat dinner. Two hours later the meter reads 163. These four data points — the pre-meal reading, the dose, the meal event, and the post-meal reading — are exactly what your endocrinologist needs to see to evaluate whether your basal-bolus ratio is working. The meter retains the readings as a timestamp sequence. It does not know what you ate, when you dosed, or how many units you gave. The clinical picture requires all four points together.

A logbook that exists only on paper gets left at home, left in the car, or lost. A logbook on the phone is with you when you test, when you dose, and when you check in at the clinic. The friction of entering four fields immediately after testing is low enough to sustain the habit. The friction of reconstructing a week from paper notes the night before an appointment is high enough that most patients do not do it accurately.

The Mealtime Field as Clinical Context

Mealtime — Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack — combined with Before/After creates the eight reading contexts that matter for diabetes management: pre-breakfast, post-breakfast, pre-lunch, post-lunch, pre-dinner, post-dinner, pre-snack, post-snack. Each context has a different target range in most management protocols, and each tells a different story about glycemic control.

A pre-dinner reading of 210 after a pre-breakfast reading of 95 suggests the problem is building across the day rather than starting high. A post-lunch reading of 280 that comes down to 145 pre-dinner suggests the lunch bolus is inadequate rather than absent. A pre-breakfast reading of 160 three days running indicates the Lantus basal dose may need adjustment regardless of what happens during the day. These patterns are only visible if the mealtime context is recorded consistently alongside the glucose value.

The Reading field is an integer — the glucometer value in mg/dL. No conversion, no derived field, just the number the meter shows, entered at the moment of testing while the meter is still in hand.

Three Insulin Types, Three Different Management Questions

HumulinR 500 ml (concentrated regular insulin, a specialized formulation for highly insulin-resistant patients), Humalog mix 75/25 100 ml (a pre-mixed analog with 75% intermediate and 25% rapid-acting components), and Lantus 100 ml (a long-acting basal analog with a relatively flat 24-hour profile) are three completely different pharmacological profiles on a single dose log.

A log that distinguishes between them allows your care team to see, at a glance, what the basal dose was on any given day versus what the meal-time coverage was. It allows you to notice when your Lantus timing drifted — if you took your basal dose at 9 PM for a month and then shifted to 7 PM, that shift appears in the record and correlates with any changes in fasting glucose patterns.

The #Units field records the actual dose given, not the prescribed dose. On days where a correction dose was added, or where food intake was higher than planned and the bolus was adjusted, the actual units in the record reflect the real clinical event, not the theoretical plan.

The Date/Time datetime field ties every record to a specific moment, which is the dimension that allows graphing. A week of readings displayed as a time-series graph shows the glycemic pattern across meals and overnight in a way that a column of numbers in a paper log does not. Memento's report view generates that graph from the Reading field plotted against Date/Time without any additional data manipulation.