From the Editor: I first met Richard Peters, inventor of the SugarTrac noninvasive glucose monitor, at the 2003 national conference of the American Association of Diabetes Educators, in Salt Lake City, Utah. We discussed his new meter, and he told me before long LifeTrac Systems would be submitting it to the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, for marketing approval.
During conversations with Mr. Peters after the AADE meeting, he told me it was their plan to incorporate voice output in the SugarTrac, with an on-off switch so people could use the voice or simply read the screen. He said it didn't make sense to first build the SugarTrac and then equip it with voice output -- as it was very easy to provide a voice synthesizer right from the start.
As conceived, the SugarTrac is a small, easy-to-use, non-invasive glucose monitor, about the size of a cell phone. No skin is pricked; no blood is drawn. A small clip fastens to the earlobe; a tiny wire connects to the meter. The clip is re-usable; there are no test strips or lancets to buy. And, as they describe, the meter is meant to talk. It's meant to be inexpensive too, no more than $100 for the machine, and a quarterly (every three months) "recoding" expense, less than $50, for the earclip.
We need something like this. We've been waiting a long time.
LifeTrac, the corporation Mr. Peters and his financial backers set up to commercialize his invention, set up a toll-free number in Fort Myers, Florida, to handle inquiries about the SugarTrac. Some time earlier this year, Mr. Peters told me he was sure they'd had approximately 10,000 calls about the meter.
Early in May 2005, I found out this number had been disconnected. I had the LifeTrac address, where Mr. Peters had been receiving the Voice for some time, physically checked. The folks they'd hired to answer the phones had moved out; not a trace remained. At the same time, the LifeTrac website had been taken down.
Several days later, the website (www.sugartrac.com) reappeared. The only changes to the site were the deletion of any toll-free number or Florida address. There were no new status reports on the meter.
I was delighted to see the website come back up. Although the information it contained was old, its reappearance suggested the meter was still being worked on ...
Around May 16, I tried contacting Mr. William Danton, president and CEO of Danton Enterprises, in Biddeford, Maine, whose organization specializes in business start-ups, and who holds the rights to the SugarTrac. I reached him, but he told me he was late for a meeting, and that he had to run. He thanked me for the call, and asked me to get back with him.
I called the next day, but someone in the office told me he had left town, but would be back in several days. He wasn't. I called several more times, and every time was told, "he is out of town, and will be back on ..." There was always a specific date for his return -- and he was never there on that date. The gentleman I spoke to said, "Mr. Danton had all kinds of calls to respond to, and had been traveling quite a bit."
I never heard from Mr. Danton. I last tried on June 1, 2005.
The man I spoke to also said he'd "let Dick [Peters] know I'd called, when he checked in that day," but that he hadn't checked in yet.
I never heard from Mr. Peters, either.
Voice of the Diabetic reaches well over 350,000 readers. I cannot understand why Mr. Danton wouldn't deem it important enough to telephone me with a status report on the SugarTrac. Thousands of diabetics, blind and sighted, read the Voice, as do more than 19,000 health professionals.
Contact:
William Danton
President, Danton Enterprises
316 Main Street, 2nd floor
Biddeford, ME 04005
(207) 284-9046
Direct: (207) 282-0878
fax: (207) 286-2858
e-mail: [email protected]
website: www.sugartrac.com