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Glucomate: an app for people who record, track, and monitor their blood glucose
- compumike 3y agoWhat's the easiest/cheapest way to obtain a continuous glucose monitor for someone curious about how blood glucose level correlates with subjective well-being and diet/exercise behaviors, but without a medical need for it?
- raphar 3y agoCan't you get Abbot Freestyle sensors? They are about 30 u$s each here, last 2 weeks. (Without prescription)
- browningstreet 3y agoThis Youtuber covers the issues and considerations in this video where he buys and reviews 5 different products: https://youtu.be/gPpAD8w4jEM https://youtu.be/gPpAD8w4jEM
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- Marisnaylor 3y agoJust gonna leave this right here... https://medium.com/@marisnaylor/continuous-glucose-monitor-cgm-app-comparison-levels-veri-nutrisense-and-january-ai-368c08e263b8 https://medium.com/@marisnaylor/continuous-glucose-monitor-c...
- RHSeeger 3y ago> There is only a needle in the applicator, and it’s very very tiny. It only hurts for like half a second and only if you’re extremely sensitive to pain like I am. It's worth noting that this varies. The G6 that I have _generally_ doesn't hurt. But... - Sometimes it hurts "somewhat" (like someone punched me, but in a small area) and that pain goes away over the course of a day or so. This tends to correspond with there being a fair amount of blood leakage when attaching it (it sometimes pools underneath the sensor). - Sometimes it just... itches. This is worse than the pain. It tends to last several days, sometimes the entire 10 days. It's rare, but it's super annoying when it happens. I will point out that I LOVE my glucose monitor. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I say it changed my life when I got it. I'm safer now; I'm old enough that I'm resistant to the signs of low blood sugar, and I've had instances of standing up from a chair and just collapsing because my blood was low (pre-monitor). And I've learned SO much about how my body reacts to various foods; I'm better equipped to eat smartly now.
- dopeboy 3y agoI asked this in my appointment a couple weeks ago. Was told insurance won’t cover it unless you are diabetic. I’m based in the US. I believe they are 200$ without insurance and you have to buy refills every two weeks.
- sghiassy 3y agoThis was my experience as well sadly
- refurb 3y agoI'm not sure why this is sad? Why would insurance spend thousands a year on something people don't need?
- bradknowles 3y agoThe websites I linked above show prices in the $60 range for Freestyle Libre 3. I have mine by prescription, so I get them through Walgreens and my insurance covers the majority of the cost. So, this isn't a problem for me. But you can get them relatively cheaply.
- code_duck 3y agoA 30-day supply of Dexcom G6 sensors is 300-450 in the US without insurance, and you also need a transmitter that lasts 90 days, which is about 150. Best I've used is Costco, about $320, but I saw a cheaper price though Amazon, under $200.
- cjcampbell 3y agoI’m slightly pre-diabetic, and that ended up being enough for my insurance to be willing to pay. I have a one year Rx for Libre 2 sensors and have paid about $40/mo based on my copay.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y agoIn the U.S. you do need a prescription to purchase one. You can just talk to your primary care doctor and tell them you're interested in getting one to screen for prediabetes, or to help you with weight loss. There's a good chance it won't be covered by insurance if you are not diabetic or taking insulin, but as long as you have the prescription you can pay out of pocket.
- bradknowles 3y agoNo, there are now CGMs that are available without a prescription as an assistive device for sports. You're not supposed to use those for medical purposes, but you can get them without a prescription. Heck, you can even get medical-grade Freestyle Libre CGMs without a prescription, if you know where to look -- see https://agelessrx.com/cgm-sensor/ https://agelessrx.com/cgm-sensor/ for one example, or https://beyondtype2.org/cgms-without-insurance/ https://beyondtype2.org/cgms-without-insurance/ for another.
- homero 3y agoThose are prescription. They send you to an online doctor.
- DougWebb 3y agoThe Libre sensor can be purchased without a prescription, and used with a free smartphone app. This link is for the V3 sensor. I bought the older 14-day sensors from this mail order pharmacy while I was using them. Cheaper than my local pharmacy or many other sources, even with shipping cost. https://myehcs.com/product/freestyle-libre-3-sensor/ https://myehcs.com/product/freestyle-libre-3-sensor/
- ramraj07 3y agoThe page literally says prescription required though? Insane price however.
- DougWebb 3y agoWow, you're right. The 14-day sensor didn't require one, but that's not available anymore.
- sfifs 3y agoLibre is very good but I unfortunately developmed an allergy to the glue they use. So you have to test and see. Also these devices have a bias and a drift and are useful for trending, not for exact results all the time. However to monitor how blood sugar trends semi-quantitatively and identify which foods cause how much spike etc, more than sufficient.
- jawngee 3y agoFlonase applied to the skin with a hydrocolloid bandage (we use Dynaderm) on top, then apply the freestyle on top of that. A lot of people are very allergic to freestyle's adhesive. The above is the common way to deal with it. Like there is a whole facebook group filled with thousands of people on the topic.
- code_duck 3y agoI developed a reaction to Dexcom adhesive after a few months of use. It slowly got worse to the point where I couldn’t leave one on for more than 4-5 days and it would leave a welt that took 15 days to heal. I haven’t ever used Flonase but the hydrocolloid does a great job. I wouldn’t be able to use them at all otherwise (and I have type 1 diabetes, so it’s important).
- radu_floricica 3y agoI tried Veri for a couple of months. Works exactly as advertised, gave me whatever insight there was to get out of glucose monitoring for a healthy individual, 10/10 would do it again. The review linked by somebody above is accurate (especially about their team being nice), so you can probably consider the reviews for the other apps as also being accurate and make your pick. But for a no-fuss good option, Veri is definitely ok. As for insights gained... pretty much everything "they" say is true. The order of how you eat foods matter. Fibers, protein, fat, alcohol and movement all lower glucose levels.
- KerryJones 3y agoI just got veri and did my first 2 weeks -- same experience. Much cheaper than some of the competitors.
- jablongo 3y agoA lot of people are claiming you need a prescription to purchase one; that is actually untrue in practice. You need a prescription to get insurance to pay for it but there are plenty of websites that sell dexcom (the best kind) devices dtc. Just search “dexcom purchase” on your favorite search engine. You’ll have to spend several hundred dollars though. Also there are services like levels or January.ai which white-label Abbott devices and handle all the prescription stuff for you.
- twawaaay 3y agoCan confirm. Just at this moment I have a Dexcom G7 attached to my arm and I don't even have diabetes. Just using it to learn a little bit about my blood glucose patterns. But these devices are not really built for non-diabetics. There is a constant barrage of alerts as my blood sugar regularly dips into hypoglycemic levels. I feel fine but the device purposefuly does not have any way to disable the alarm.
- jablongo 3y agoYou can adjust the alerts a little bit. If you are actually going below 60 on a regular basis then you are hypoglycemic and the alerts are probably useful. It’s possible that your readings were slightly off though. Thanks for driving down prices for the rest of us! Keep on ordering em, big spender! I mean that.
- twawaaay 3y agoMy blood sugar goes below 60 but I am not hypoglycemic and no, the alerts are not useful. And yes, the measurements are correct -- I have more than one way to measure blood sugar level. Hypoglycemic means your body is dependant on sugar, can't get sugar and has adverse reaction to it. My body can't get sugar, true, but is not dependant on it (fat adapted) and I have no reaction to it. As I have not eaten any carbs for about two months any notion of hypoglycemia due to not eating sugar is a bit meaningless. I know people who get much, much lower blood sugar levels and feel fine. The levels they get would (below 40? below 30?) would be lethal to "normal" person, if sugar addiction can be called normal at all. But they all feel fine and are probably healthier than most. I put CGM on my arm to learn how my blood sugar levels look when on my diet and then what happens when I switch carbs back on -- I expect my body to "freak out" a little bit and then stabilise within couple of days and that's what I would like to see in a bit clearer detail using my CGM. As to driving the prices down... nah, I am not making a dent. These devices are too expensive to use regularly even for me (software devs salary). I will just put a couple of them to learn a bit about myself and then stop when I got what I needed.
- moneywoes 3y agoHow big is the benefit for non diabetics subjective well being? Anything I can do cheaper?
- iaresee 3y agoCheaper? Yes. Finger sticks. A non-diabetic really gains very little useful insight from continuous monitoring.
- veidr 3y agoIn the US it is insanely expensive and non-easy unless you have a doctor in your thrall who can prescribe it. There's some startup doing "CGM just FYI" but it is like USD $500 per month IIRC. Other countries, such as Australia, you can just buy them for normal capitalism prices (IIRC like USD 200$ and you own it). So it very much depends where you are.
- DoughnutHole 3y agoWow, and I thought they were pricy in Europe (Freestyle Fibre is €65 for a two-week monitor). Between things like this and the price of insulin the US is really trying to kill off its diabetics. Not great when nearly half of Americans are either diabetic or pre-diabetic.
- nervousvarun 3y agoDon't necessarily disagree with your basic premise as the U.S. government is in bed with Big Pharma (and really big Everything) to actively wage economic war against its citizens...but finally there is some positive news with insulin: https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lilly-cuts-insulin-prices-70-and-caps-patient-insulin-out-pocket https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
- Aloha 3y agoI wish my CGM supported it, I have the freestyle sensors and they do not.
- purpleaburoy 3y agoI use an app called Glucose Direct, it’s in beta, that reads the Libre 3 data and writes it to healthkit which then can be read by glucomate.
- petesergeant 3y agoI got my father-in-law to give me a freestyle sensor, which was region-locked. I ended up buying one of these[0], and it worked well to get the data into healthkit 0: https://www.ambrosiasys.com/product/waterproof-nightrider-blucon/ https://www.ambrosiasys.com/product/waterproof-nightrider-bl...
- jawngee 3y agoWe use this with my son's freestyle: https://miaomiao.cool https://miaomiao.cool
- throwawaybetes 3y agoThis turns freestyle 2 into an actual CGM. Complicated to set up but I've been using it for years without Libre's terrible apps. https://www.minimallooper.com/post/how-to-setup-freestyle-libre-2-and-oop2-to-use-a-native-bluetooth-connection-in-xdrip https://www.minimallooper.com/post/how-to-setup-freestyle-li...
- jawngee 3y agoSeems strange this doesn't support Nightscout as a source.
- hirenj 3y agoHere’s a relevant thread on Twitter announcing a dataset of glucose measurements for healthy people. https://twitter.com/segal_eran/status/1649061705115115521?s=46&t=2IfbOaKHoKcBLb4yWblpvg https://twitter.com/segal_eran/status/1649061705115115521?s=... The data lives here: http://humanphenotypeproject.org/ http://humanphenotypeproject.org/
- code_duck 3y agoVery interesting! Many people with T1D wonder, when they get a sensor, what a “normal” glucose chart would look like. I’ve never seen a graph for a non diabetic person. I’ve checked the glucose of friends a time or two and it’s consistently been 85, which was good to know.
- poutrathor 3y agoDoes this study will answer the question behind the low-GI food trend, which is (as best as I understand the topic) : "what are the impact of high, medium, low GI food on our health as non diabetic people" ? Did they track the cohort meals ? (for reference https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/low-glycemic-index-diet/art-20048478 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...)
- cardosof 3y agoWould love to give it a look but there's no Android support.
- mlsu 3y agoI'm not sure if you are aware, but you have something close to a name collision: https://www.sugarmate.io/ https://www.sugarmate.io/ There are several more in this space, at least if you are using a Dexcom CGM: https://www.dexcom.com/en-us/partnerships/health-apps https://www.dexcom.com/en-us/partnerships/health-apps. If you are wondering about commercialization, you can get into (US, can't speak for other countries!) regulatory weeds pretty quickly, especially if your commercial plan involves informing clinicians.
- psychphysic 3y agoNot to mention the similarity to glutamate.
- GiorgioG 3y agoSugarmate is awesome! In fact we just got an automated phone call at 5am from Sugarmate letting us know our son’s sugar was low. It’s a killer feature.
- willio58 3y agoAt a certain point when do governments stop caring about similar names like this? {something}mate is like {something}ly is like {something}r is like {something}io. They're all just words with a little flourish at the end, who's to say you "own" a word with a flourish? Just seems dumb.
- lbotos 3y agoIt's about brand confusion in the same vertical. So naming collisions can happen as long as they are in separate domains. If your brand is too close to another, are you causing confusion? If you went to the store and saw on the shelf: - NutriBlend (Parent Co NutriCo) - NutriActive (Parent Co NutriCo) - NutriSport (Parent Co Athletic Treats Inc) Could you think that NutriSport was a product of NutriCo? If so, thats the part the governments care about. They want people to be able to trust in commerce, to maximize tax revenue.
- veidr 3y agoThat isn't close to a naming collision in a legal/trademark sense. Neither the "mate" of "Sugarmate" nor the "Glu" ooh ooh ooh nearness to "Glooko" is close enough to be actionable (in the US, anyway, but in this kind of thing what else matters ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯). Disclaimer: IANAL but have substantial experience with anally-extracted objections to naming (and other things)
- heisenzombie 3y agoI love the clean design and healthkit integration, but for me it can't beat Glooko. Mainly for the integration with my T:Slim x2 insulin pump, so I can correlate what control-IQ is doing to my insulin, with my blood glucose readings from my CGM. That's super important to me to make decisions about pump settings.
- ijustlovemath 3y agoWhy were none of the existing solutions good for you? Glooko, Clarity, Nightscout all come to mind
- starkrights 3y agoYeah, I have some really mixed opinions about this, and it's honestly really conflicting for me. As both a type 1 and a wannabe codemonkey, I love the idea of innovation and new software ~things~ in the t1d world because it's the confluence of two very essential circles to me. But... this just kinda rubs me the wrong way. It's discussed and presented as if it's the first/only thing in its class- admittedly it doesn't do this in any overglorified or oversensationalized way, but just... in sheer ignorance of large, giants in the field who have done far more than this project for far longer. The literal only thing this project purports to do is provide analysis for glucose data, and only from one very proprietary source, healthkit. Clarity and Glooko have been around forever, and they're stable, corporate products. But even disregarding the 'official' stuff, NightScout's reports are insanely powerful, https://nightscout.github.io/nightscout/reports/ https://nightscout.github.io/nightscout/reports/ and have been around for ages, and it and the existence of Loopkit constitute massive existing t1d/developer communities It's a pretty app, and probably more userfriendly than nightscout to nontechnical folk, but why not just say that if that's your selling point? Why just ignore everything and pretend like you're the only thing that exists? It feels dishonest and impersonal- borderline corporate, except I almost guarantee any corporate project that exists solely as a stand-in replacement to an existing product would be comparing themselves to every available baseline they could. It's like there's this broad community that already exists, and this project just... pretends they don't exist? I don't get how someone who's remotely tangential to the T1D community could either overlook that, or intentionally refrain from discussion about it. It's not really a super egregious thing, so I don't know why I seem to care so much, but the whole vibe of this 'project' just feels odd to me.
- ijustlovemath 3y agoCouldn't have put it any better, as someone who's been involved in diabetes technology research for almost 10 years
- philsnow 3y agoCongrats on this launch! I don't (yet) have to monitor my blood glucose but I have family who does, and I'll be sending them a link. I like how it puts a usable face on all the data squirreled away in HealthKit. I use a similar approach for weight measurements, where one (ugly, annoying, locked-in) app that came with my scale adds measurements to HealthKit, but I use Happy Scale to view and interpret the measurements. Have you considered making an Android version of Glucomate? I haven't looked into HealthKit itself but I'm working on another app that has privacy-sensitive concerns. When considering whether to make an Android version of my app, I realize that as little as I know about building privacy-respecting apps for ios devices, Android seems like at least an order of magnitude harder.
- unixhero 3y agoIs this necessary? In my mind spreadsheet with a graph is sufficient for these ki ds of time series data.
- newjersey 3y agoThe article mentions an important part missing in the title > It's an app for people who record, track, and monitor their blood glucose and use HealthKit to do it. They have hardware that writes to HealthKit with a few hours delay. So this app allows users access this HealthKit data.
- pyrelight 3y agoI love the nod to the "a cure is just 5 to 10 years away". Sad but true :( As a T2D, I don't have a CGM but if I ever do need one I'll definitely check this out if it's still around by then. Looks amazing.
- ddorian43 3y agoIsn't a cure for T2D just a low-carb/keto diet?
- GeneralAntilles 3y agoIndeed, though the author is T1 and referring to a T1 cure. From the article: > During that time, I've heard various things about a cure for type 1 diabetes. Funnily enough, it's always 5-10 years away. I won't get my hopes up, but what I do know is that over the last couple of decades, despite there not being a cure, the technology available to treat and manage the disease has improved dramatically.
- stmblast 3y agoThis is really cool! The 5-10 years away comment hit quite close to home and it's sad that it's a reality for a lot of people.
- thecosas 3y agoDisclaimer: I'm the OP, but not the app creator. I posted this to HN because I've had T1D for 30 years (since I was 8) and been a heavy tech enthusiast for nearly that amount of time. It's not often that I see those worlds collide and thought others would be interested not only in the app itself, but part of the personal story behind the developer. To address some of the comments about the app's functionality ands why it's compelling, here's why I like it and am giving it a shot: - I use a CGM (Dexcom G6) which reports info to HealthKit (although on a 3-hour delay, don't get me started) - I'm an Apple Watch user who tracks both sleep and workouts - This app provides a simple way to retroactively see what my BG was doing during both sleep and workouts. Yes, you can get this information through other solutions or by time matching against a more detailed graph, but this app provides a much easier, lightweight way to do it IMO. - I've played with solutions like nightscout, but found them overall to be tricky to set up and maintain and don't think they are good solutions for the average person. I'll probably take another look as a weekend project since it's been a while. - Glooko, Tidepool (which I'm familiar with) and many other apps have excellent reports, but IMO are still fairly heavyweight for what I am looking to get. Overall, I think that this is a great start for an app and is made by a solo, indie, T1D developer who is actively soliciting feedback. I support them in those pursuits :-)
- robtherobber 3y agoI feel that whenever someone shares an iOS-specific app, news or anything else, this should be specified in the title.
- thecosas 3y agoSorry about that! Will do next time :-) Beyond which platform it's on, the article describes some of the developer's experiences as a long-time diabetic and which gaps he saw in the market etc so may still be interesting to people who are not iOS users, but I get what you're saying.