It's been a real life changer. Before I'd have to stay up at night to check his blood a couple of times, but now I no longer need to. We've been able to flatten his curve and keep him in a sane range by adapting his basal rate based on the data. I can see when he is dropping low at school and inform them to correct the situation.
I'm not sure why the author isn't using nightscout data for his complication though. Great article, none the less.
Glucose monitors in general are expensive ($100+ retail) products that are meant to be disposable every two weeks, which itself is insane. I understand the design constraints that the Libre is under, and they are onerous, but they just have to make a more reliable product.
xDrip also has a feature that will calibrate the libre with pokes which increases the accuracy.
We never bolus off the libre's readings though, but it's fantastic for trends and seeing spikes and crashes in real-time. For example, I can see that my son is high af between 8am to 11am (post breakfast spike), so I've tweaked his basal rate a few times so that he's always in range now during that time period with no crashing afterwards.
I mean, I would love a dexcom over the libre any day of the week, but I'll take what I can get here in Vietnam.
Overall I'm impressed but there's quite a lot of waste, I'd love a reusable applicator.
I can imagine this being incredibly useful for parents!
It must've been really, really hard navigating this minefield without it. Speaking of minefields, grocery stores are one. There's sugar in everything the sugar industry made Americans into sugar addicts, it's absolutely shocking and horrifying just how much of it is in bloody everything.
As wonderful a medical innovation dexcom is, their website is absolutely terrible. I am Canadian but I run an AT&T SIM because it's cheaper -- in 2018, AT&T removed North American roaming restrictions, they know and they are fine with us using it 100% in Canada. Now, the Dexcom app uses the gsm.sim.operator.iso-country Android system property to determine which country you are in. If it finds US then it registers you to https://uam1.dexcom.com/ otherwise https://uam2.dexcom.com/. There's absolutely no way to user select this. However, the browser uses IP geolocation... because of course it does. So you can't log into your own account unless you figure the above uam discrepancy out and manually go to the correct one. And for Canadians there is a store account which is neither of the above. It's an independent third. Because of course it is. There's nothing on the dexcom website or app which would mention any of this and their tech support won't say either. It's been a nightmare trying to figure it out.
They're great but also super expensive.
Diabetes, obesity and heart disease are often caused by excessive amounts of glucose in the bloodstream which causes your body to react to this emergency by spiking insulin which crams all the glucose into your fat cells and if those are full into your muscle and organ cells. At some point there will be inflammation in your blood veins which leads to plaque blocking the blood stream. That's when your heart will struggle to pump blood through your body.
The app tries to predict blood glucose in the future (drawing on CGM, food intake, lots of parameters and other data) and based on that either automatically injects insulin, or asks the user to confirm.
People need to compile the app themselves because the liability in the case of adverse effects is insanely high.
It’s a highly driven community. I’ve seldom seen such a useful and well supported application of modern tech.
Source: I worked for a company in the diabetes app space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaby_Jack#Insulin_pumps
Do you mind sharing who the team is? Do they have any literature available?
https://investors.rockleyphotonics.com/news/news-details/202...
There was a press release last year because they're an Apple partner. I have high hopes but I keep remembering that Theranos had a lot of promise too.
This is why I sleep so much better since getting a CGM, it's life changing because one can make data driven decisions that minimize risk and be alerted when it's time to pay attention. It helps take away cognitive load that lessons the risk of burnout too.
I was diagnosed T2 about 2.5 years ago, and worse a Freestyle Libre (not technically a CGM, but very close) for the first 6 months or so. Very useful for figuring out how I'd react to certain things, and I've got things pretty well under control now (A1C ~5.5)
Low is much more dangerous than high...
As the saying goes, High glucose will kill you in 30 years, low gluclose in 30 minutes.
CGMs can make all the difference in the world, and I hope they continue to get better.
(context: my son is DT1) We learn (in France) that hypoglycemia can lead to unconsciousness, but cannot be fatal as the liver will eventually take over and release glucose to the organism, as it always does for healthy persons. Glucagen injection is the way to get this release to happen fast, but it can be delayed if necessary.
- brain death during prolonged severe hypos
- or cardiac arrhythmias
Im T1 myself
You might be better off finding a diabetic friend if you just want to capture data and reverse eng protocols
Was a fairly hassle free process. I never spoke to a doctor and use the device for the reasons you said. Just interested in the data.
Unfortunately, in this case you need to pay for a certificate for signing the app, build it yourself and so on
Apparently they’re extremely helpful for children and parents, who don’t know how to track their condition yet.
This solution could be amazing for those children/parents
Anyone have experience with contact sports and such devices?
For non-contact sports (football) mine have been fine though.
“Google was working on (and then cancelled [0]) a contact lens that measured glucose levels in the tears and then communicated those levels with a small LED in the lens itself.”
[0] https://www.labiotech.eu/in-depth/contact-lens-glucose-diabe...
Also, the alternative is pricking your finger so it bleeds, which is much less pleasant.
One thing op doesn't talk about is close loop systems, which automate some of the insulin delivery using the sensors. They're still in the very early days, but they're generally good at dealing with random variation or overnight highs.
> That's what Beta Bionics, amongst others, are focusing on. Their iLet® system literally bills itself as "a fully automated bionic pancreas".
There's so many things that can affect your blood glucose level that it can be maddening to deal with as a diabetic. Mood, activity level, time of day/night, different foods take longer/shorter to raise your blood sugar, etc.
Beyond that, I mostly eat the same stuff all the time so I know what it's going to do to my glucose even without the CGM telling me about it.
I still would like to give it another few months to narrow down all the other environmental factors - sleep, exercise, stress, alcohol etc. and see how my blood glucose reacts.
Needle in the skin is a non-issue. You won't feel it at all. It's like keeping a bandaid on for a month.
If you just want it for a month to check out your blood sugar, you can ask your doctor to prescribe you a one-month trial pack. (They're technically for diabetes screening to see if you're diabetic/prediabetic).
If you want them for a longer period of time, and you don't care about insurance covering the thing, you can straight up buy them from a startup like Levels. I think they have a doctor prescribe one for you via video call, but it's more just to explain how to use the thing, and it's unlikely to be covered under insurance if you're not diabetic.
This is quite insensitive. I am a person with T1D. It doesn’t mean I’m unhealthy.
- glucose levels are not always "normal", for instance goes high if we eat something rich in sugar while we are PERFECTLY healthy, the smart-glucometer can't know that;
- a needle, even a micro-set of needles that constantly punch through our skin always in the same place is a recipe for infections and minor issues.
Surely Apple, and not only Apple, like to collect as much health data as possible, perhaps in a not so far future linking them to a new kind of social score "The Life Score" who decide for instance if we need meds what we get, sometimes good ones if we are useful for the society, as decided by those who master the score itself, a small élite, sometimes something to make us die because we are evolved to be useless again for the aforementioned élite.
Oh, BTW such planning-management-erotic-dreams was not much new a guy named adolf from Austria then Germany few years ago have tried a world war measuring how much "soldiers" local women can "produce" to match number of fallen ones... Try looking for Lebensborn project, which BTW means "those born out of love", a curious kind of love anyway...
Is this the society we want for the future? Something like the relatively recent Canadian TV series "Continuum"? for the future distopic part, without the rebellion of course.
Oh sure, we might have some marginal, in some cases potentially life-saving, benefits, but at what price? Do you really prefer being eventually saved at a certain age if you are still useful and you eventually fall ill, trading THE ENTIRE LIFE to be allowed to live under conditions you do not control if you are useful for someone else?
Such ideas have born before the French revolution, perhaps earlier, just to overturn the Revolution itself, maybe it's time to recover a bit of the old good spirit dropping the rest.
