Posted by on Monday 19 April 2010

NovoPen with a memory please

My NovoPen 4 is great. It's an absolutely star piece of kit. Solid, nice-looking and reliable.

But about 5 years ago I had a brainwave.

What I need, I thought to myself, is an injection pen that automatically stores the doses and timings of recent injections and displays them on a little LCD screen on the pen.

That way when I'm varying the timing of doses (before/during/after meals) to match the activity curve of NovoRapid with the absorption of what I'm eating - and even more importantly when I'm splitting doses to phase the delivery over a longer time period (especially helpful for larger celebratory meals, or those higher in fat where absorption can often be significantly delayed) I won't forget what I'm up to. Recently as often as two or three times a month I've forgotten to inject at all (believing I'd done so already). Or even worse, double dosed. Not good.

Having looked around I've since found the Eli-Lilly 'Memoir' pen and I'm seriously considering changing insulins just to be able to have this facility - that's how useful I believe it would be to me.

So I've been on to NovoNordisk to ask them directly if they could get their R&D boffins on the case with a heartfelt plea. I was pleasantly surprised to get a very prompt and courteous email back... "Thank you for your message" they said... "very interesting and useful to get a users perspective...", "we'll send your request to our head office in Denmark..."

Just today I've discovered NovoPen 'Echo' due for launch later in 2010 in the US which has a little screen in the end. "Woo hoo!" you say? Well, er no. I'm afraid not. Sadly it's only being aimed at children with diabetes (ehhhhh?!) and I understand there is no plan to make the Echo available to adults in the UK market any time soon, if at all.

Not sure if anything will come of my appeal to NovoNordisk's better nature, but I hope it does. I've much preferred NovoPens to any other delivery device I've used.

Update: Thanks for the memoir-y

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