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How does it read glucose levels with impedance? Surely diabetics would have jumped on this technology before mainstream wearables.

by 1stop 13y ago

JeremyNT 13y ago
I read up on this a bit, and bioelectrical impedance is actually potentially useful for glucose monitoring. Products utilizing the technique have been produced and tested in the past. From what I can tell though, no such products have been suitable for medical use by diabetics, since precision and reliability requirements are very high. My understanding is that one could probably produce something that monitors glucose in this manner, but it would be inadequate for medical use. Since there's not a lot of non-medical use for glucose level data, there has not been much impetus to create such a product. I asked about this product on Reddit[0] and got a few replies. A user there claims the product could be legitimate, but lists several caveats regarding its potential capabilities based on its hardware. IF one assumes that the product is real and has the hardware mentioned in the marketing video, I believe it would face several major problems in actual use: 1) It probably wouldn't be very accurate at detecting glucose levels 2) Glucose levels alone aren't a proxy for caloric intake, since such levels are impacted differently depending on the macronutrients consumed. 3) There will be a substantial delay before meals impact the reading at all. I believe that they could make this device, but given the limitations of the proposed technique, as a way to measure calories it would be so inaccurate / untimely that any data generated would be essentially useless except for identifying the broadest trends. It would likely be worthless for use in portion control, for example, which is where calorie tracking is most useful. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/2059tg/is_this_indiegogo_project_a_scam_healbe_gobe/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/2059tg/is_this_indieg...

How does it read glucose levels with impedance? Surely diabetics would have jumped on this technology before mainstream wearables.

by 1stop 13y ago

How does it read glucose levels with impedance? Surely diabetics would have jumped on this technology before mainstream wearables.

JeremyNT 13y ago

I read up on this a bit, and bioelectrical impedance is actually potentially useful for glucose monitoring. Products utilizing the technique have been produced and tested in the past. From what I can tell though, no such products have been suitable for medical use by diabetics, since precision and reliability requirements are very high. My understanding is that one could probably produce something that monitors glucose in this manner, but it would be inadequate for medical use. Since there's not a lot of non-medical use for glucose level data, there has not been much impetus to create such a product. I asked about this product on Reddit[0] and got a few replies. A user there claims the product could be legitimate, but lists several caveats regarding its potential capabilities based on its hardware. IF one assumes that the product is real and has the hardware mentioned in the marketing video, I believe it would face several major problems in actual use: 1) It probably wouldn't be very accurate at detecting glucose levels 2) Glucose levels alone aren't a proxy for caloric intake, since such levels are impacted differently depending on the macronutrients consumed. 3) There will be a substantial delay before meals impact the reading at all. I believe that they could make this device, but given the limitations of the proposed technique, as a way to measure calories it would be so inaccurate / untimely that any data generated would be essentially useless except for identifying the broadest trends. It would likely be worthless for use in portion control, for example, which is where calorie tracking is most useful. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/2059tg/is_this_indiegogo_project_a_scam_healbe_gobe/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/2059tg/is_this_indieg...