My son does something similar. In Vietnam, only the Freestyle Libre 1 is available, so we got the aftermarket MiaoMiao transmitter for it. The transmitter talks to an iPhone running xDripForiOS (https://github.com/JohanDegraeve/xdripswift) which, in turn, pushes the CGM data to nightscout (https://nightscout.github.io). We can then follow that data on nightscout using xdrip on our own phones.

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.

I had some ideas on how unreliable all nutrition research is but nothing prepared for the flood of bad advice once I was diagnosed with diabetes T2. I now trust one thing and one thing alone and that's my Dexcom G6. If it shows a spike eating the same meal twice , that meal is off the list. That easy. I deleted normal flour, potatoes and rice from my life and per three month blood checks I do not even count as prediabetic now. (Of course, the system is still very much not okay: I ate a slice of brown bread in Vienna thinking it might be okay, it wasn't okay. Luckily, I am not getting seizures from it, phew!)

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.

Many people are controlling their insulin pumps via phone and watch apps: https://github.com/LoopKit/Loop

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.

I'm actually part of a research team working on using a wrist mounted spectrometer to actually measure glucose continuously and non-invasively. Turns out it's a really really hard problem.

Friend of my wife, type 1, just 2 weeks ago died in his sleep from mismanaged blood sugar. He was only 37 and was otherwise very healthy - it was shocking, I never knew it was so dangerous and that mis measuring or forgetting before going to bed could have such dire consequences. I though it was like sleeping with your contacts in. This is a gap this tech could close, I hope it’s widely available soon - hopefully an artificial pancreas is near as well.

Rockley Photonics is partnered with Apple and medical device makers, developing a spectrophotometer on a chip for devices like the Apple Watch and other medical wristbands. Their sensors can measure multiple biomarkers in the blood in addition to glucose, like alcohol, hydration, core body temperature, lactate. They are presenting at the Baird investment conference Monday morning. https://www.yahoo.com/now/rockley-photonics-present-baird-20...

I was looking into this the other week, I couldn't find a CGM supplier in the US that would sell dtc. I don't need it for any medical reasons. Im just interested in the data. Anyone know of a supplier?

The author has done a lot of work, but the title of this article is very misleading. There's no monitoring happening on the watch, it's just used to display the results that are collected by another device.

The Dexcom G7 (not yet released) is supposed to be able to connect directly to the Apple Watch. The current G6 requires the phone but does have a watch complication that displays your current trend and trend graph.

I’ve always been clueless about this subject until lately I’ve been helping out with getting these electronic monitors into Ukraine.

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

The real breakthrough will be when diabetics can stop worrying about ANY monitoring at all, and we just make the pancreas start creating insulin again. I'm hoping the developments out of Michael Levin's lab at Tufts will lead to many medical breakthroughs by controlling cell function and differentiation at a high level.

Are these devices (Free Style Libre) safe for contact sports? I wanted to wear one and even got a scrip for one as i am pre-diabetic. I do BJJ 4x a week and am concerned about the device on the arm getting dislodged or broken. I thought about neoprene arm sleeve, etc.

Anyone have experience with contact sports and such devices?

What ever happened to that glucose monitoring contact lens that google/verily was working on?

Opening up the API on wearables is going to be the real change in digital health. The last 2 years was a flood of poor investments. Natural Cycles is a digital/non-hormonal birth control that will be awesome

Sounds cool if i didn't have to have micro needles in my arm. Anyone wear one of these things? I figure it useful for a month then after that you have a sense on what impacts your glucose…

Where does one buy these glucose monitors ? Do you need to get it prescribed by doctors ? Or can healthy people get one too ?

Few notes:

- 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.

Is there a way to get this device without a prescription? I tried phone apps that use the FreeStyle Libre and make it into a CGM (e.g., https://www.levelshealth.com/).

They're great but also super expensive.

What? It is pretty well established that continuous glucose monitoring is the go to method for avoiding potentially invasive diabetes and heart related surgery.

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.

Total tangent, but having moved to Germany from the UK, one thing I can’t find is (what in the UK we’d call) granary or seeded bread. The Germans have lots of lovely bread… but even the dark brown stuff is very smooth with (I assume) refined flour and no major seed/grain content. This might explain your blood sugar spike from brown bread?

Looking back to when my father was alive with diabetes T2 in the late 80s/early 90s, nearly all the nutritional information turned out to be total bollocks. I would go as far as saying the information was seriously harmful. We still have a good way to go, but things are definitely night and day compared to 30 years ago.

As a t1d who's been using a cgm for like 8 years at this point, having it there constantly is objectively better, and you normally don't notice the needle (needs a bit of fat though). Fairly routinely, I'll go a couple of days without because the installation is a bit of a pain, and my blood sugar is invariably worse on those days. A big part of it is the reduction in cognitive load devoted to managing your blood glucose. You don't have to estimate what it's doing, just decide on the right action to take. It can wake you up when you're going low, which is much better then waking up in a cold sweat and devouring your kitchen refrigerator from the hunger.

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.

My 10 year old is a type 1 diabetic and wears a Dexcom CGM. It isn't really a needle that's in your skin (for 10 days in this case), it's a flexible filament. It is delivered/inserted into you skin via a special insertion device.

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.

I had an IV needle stuck in my arm for a couple days when I had appendicitis. If it weren't for the tube hanging off it, I would have hardly known it was there. I barely felt it going in, either. I'm quite sure a CGM is even less obtrusive.

Yep I used levels health for a month and it was extremely useful.

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.