[berkes]

Diabetic here. These days, the meter and even insulin pump comes with touch and color screens.

My vision is good, but I imagine diabetics with poor eyesight (which is a common effect of diabetes) basically get unusable devices.

My previous pump and my first meters all had dedicated buttons. A button "on", a button for "give insulin" then two buttons to "crank up or down the amount to give" and so on. All these buttons had braille on them and were tactile and often form-coded. Up, was an triangular up-arrow, etc. I could blindly operate it in my pocket with one hand.

Now my pump requires me to go through dialogs, menu's and workflows for which the state and the options are only on the screen. And my meter looks like a cheap chinese android phone (and has about the same battery time) with only touchscreen interfacing. I often miss my doses because some warning dialog breaks muscle-memory or because -somehow- the pump decides that today we need an extra step in the wizard.

It's good when medical equipment "goes with the time", but touch-screens and color-lcd screens are really not suited for medical devices in their "mass consumer" form.