What To Look For In A Glucometer

I received a question some time ago about which glucometer I would recommend, if any, and I thought I would put down some notes about this, since I do have opinions, but I also know full well that I’m not the right person to recommend medical devices in the first place.

So just we’re clear, I’m not a medical professional, and I can only suggest as for what to look for when choosing a blood sugar meter device. If your GP or diabetologist is recommending one in particular over others, I would recommend you follow their suggestion over mine.

So first of all, what are we talking about? I’m going to be focusing on blood glucometers exclusively, because the choice within CGMs (Continuous Glucose Meters) and “flash” meter solutions (such as the FreeStyle Libre) are more limited, and I have even less experience on those. I also found out of personal experience, together with talking with a number of other CGM users, that those tend to be a lot more temperamental and personal choices.

Blood glucometers, as the name implies, work by measuring the sugar in the blood by putting a drop of blood (usually taken by pricking a finger) onto a chemically reactive “strip” (with the exception of one device to my knowledge). I have over the years “reviewed” a number of meters on this blog, simply because I end up getting my hands on them out of hobby nowadays, to reverse engineer and implement support (when feasible) in my open source tooling.

Let me repeat: I do not have the technical expertise to judge the clinical effectiveness of glucometers. I do know that most of them have a wide margin on their readings, to the point that you may have noticed me annoyed at the difference readings on a recent stream. Most meters provide details about their accuracy in the paperwork, and they assert you can use certain calibration solution to verify that your particular device satisfied that calibration. Unfortunately when I have been looking at this in the past I couldn’t figure out whether there is an universal solution that could be used to compare the readings of the same exact concentration across different meters.

So, if I wasn’t using the Libre, what glucometer would I be using, and why? Most likely I’d still be using the Accu-Chek Mobile. As far as I am aware it’s still the only model of meter that uses a cartridge system rather than strips, and when going out for dinner or coffee, or being in the office, it’s nice to have the option to just check your blood sugar without having to worry about getting blood all over the place, or having to find where to throw the now-used strip. While the device is not the smallest glucometer out there, the carrying case does still make for a much more compact solution than most of the alternatives used, and the USB “thumbdrive” with data and graphs make it very easy to access with most devices. I have not tried the Bluetooth integration kit, though I did order one, but I guess that was needed for the increasing amount of people who do not use a “computer” daily, but does have access to a smartphone.

But this is just my choice, obviously. If you live in a country that does not provide to you the strips for free (or you don’t have an official diagnosis for which they would provide them for free), then the cost of the supplies is likely the main significant factor. Many of the manufacturers appear to have taken to the “razor and blades” approach of giving out the meters for free, or nearly free, but charging you (or your healthcare system) heavily for the strips. So it might be worth looking at the price of strips in your country to figure out on the long term what’s the cost of using a certain meter or another.

This is my best guess on why people appear to be finding my reviews of Chinese glucometers: to the best of my understanding there’s a number of countries, including Russia, where meters and strips are paid out of pocket, and so people turn to AliExpress, because there’s enough supply — most Chinese meters appear to use the same strips, and sellers undercut each other all the time, particularly when the strips are about to expire.

If price and availability are not an issue, and neither is the cartridge vs strips, then it continues down the road of features. Is the meter going to be used by an older person with eyesight issue? Look for a very big display. Is it going to be used by someone who has trouble with at a glance estimation of what is okay and isn’t (well noting that this category is pretty much transversal to age groups and education)? Look for a colour display that includes Green/Yellow/Red indicators, possibly one where the thresholds are configurable.

Some of the features also depend on what your doctors’ take on technology is. My diabetologist in Dublin didn’t have any diabetes management system for me to upload readings to, so I settled with running the exports with whichever software and sending it over as a PDF, while my new support team here in London uses Abbott’s LibreView. Am I completely comfortable turning to a cloud solution? No. But in the grand scheme of things it’s a tradeoff that works well for me, particularly after a year of Covid-19 pandemic, during which showing up at the hospital just to hand off my meter to be downloaded into the system would not have been a fun experience.

So if your medical team has set up a specific software for you to upload your data to, you probably want to choose a compatible meter. And that might mean either one that has PC connectivity so you can download it with a specific client, or one that has Bluetooth connectivity so that you can download it with your phone. With additional complications for macOS users and pretty much zero support for Linux users outside of devices supported by my glucometerutils, Tidepool or other similar solutions.

Different software also has different “analytics” of readings, with averages before and after meals and bucketed by time of day. Honestly, I don’t think I ever had enough useful information for a blood meter to build significant statistics out of it, but if that’s your cup of tea, that might be a good feature to choose your meter from (as long as you’re not using glucometerutils in which case just get any meter and build the analytics out of it).

Again depending heavily on who’s going to be using it, it’s important to take into consideration the physical size and a few of the practicalities of using a blood meter. Smaller meters work great if you have small hands, but they would be too fiddly to operate for someone with large, not nimbly hands. That’s why a lot of the models aimed at older people (with sound, large display, etc) are often designed to be big and with large and mushy buttons, rather than small and clicky. The same goes for strips: as I noted on the GlucoMen Areo review, Menarini did a very nice job with fairly large strips that are easier to handle, compared to, say, the tiny strips used by FreeStyle or OneTouch. But even with tiny strips, the meter can help with making it easier to handle; both of the Chinese meters I have reviewed have a lever to eject the strip directly into the trash, rather than having to take it out with your fingers — while I suspect this may just be cultural, it’s definitely a useful feature to have for those who are squeamish about handling blooded strips.

I would say that it’s pretty much impossible to have a meter fit all of the best characteristics, because a lot of those are subjective: I have nimble fingers, good numeracy, and a few reserves with sharing my data with unknown cloud providers, but with a medical team that does indeed use diabetes management systems. So if I had to be looking for a new meter (rather than the Libre) right now, I would probably be looking for a compact meter, that can be downloaded either with an application that exports directly to my doctors’, or with one that can generate a file I can email them, and the Accu-Chek still fits the bill: it does not have colourful display to tell me whether something is in range or not, and its buttons are clicky and not too wide, but it’s a tradeoff that works for me.

This should also probably explain why I talk about the stuff I talk about when I write my glucometers reviews: it’s all about how the device feels, what features it has, and how well it works to do what you want. Some of the models are more intuitive than others, and some have tradeoffs that don’t work for me, but I can see where they came from. I cannot compare the accuracy, since I don’t have the training to do so, but I can compare the rest of the features, and that’s what I focus on: it’s what most people will do anyway.

More Chinese Glucometers: Sinocare Safe AQ UG

Years ago, I was visiting Shanghai for work, and picked up a Sannuo glucometer. Somehow that blog post keeps getting the interest of people, and indeed it has better stats than some of my more recent glucometer reviews. I found it strange, until one night, while my wife was playing online, I found myself browsing AliExpress and thought “I wonder if they sell glucometers”. Of course they do.

While browsing AliExpress for glucometers it dawned on me not just why so many people kept finding my blog post, but also the answers to a number of questions I had about that meter, that I don’t think I would have otherwise had answers for. And so, I decided to throw some “craic money” to getting another Chinese glucometer to look at.

So, first of all, what’s going on with my blog post? Turns out that there’s a lot of glucometers on AliExpress. Some are at least branded the same as you would find in Europe or the USA with what looks like official OneTouch and Abbott storefronts on AliExpress — which does not surprise me too much, I already found out that Abbott has a physical store in UAE that sells Libre sensors, which work with my Libre reader but not with the mobile phone app. But for the rest you find a lot of generic names that don’t inspire much — until you start noticing two big brands sold by a lot of different sellers: Sannuo and Sinocare. And as I noted in the previous post, the meter was branded Sannuo but had Sinocare names all around — turns out the former is just a brand of the latter.

I also started getting a funny feeling of understanding about the miniUSB plug that was present on the Sannuo meter: most if not all of the generic branded meters had a similar plug. But this was named “code” port. And indeed a few of the Sannuo/Sinocare models had enough explanation in English explained how this works.

Coding of testing strips is something that European and North American (at least) meters used to need in the past. You would get your packet of strips and there would be a number on the outside (the “code”), which you would select on the meter either before or right after fitting the strip inside. The code carried informations about the reactiveness of the strip and was needed to get an accurate reading. Over time, this practice has fallen out of favour with “code-less” strips becoming the norm. In particular in Europe it seems like the old style of coded strips is not even marketed anymore due to regulation.

The Sannuo meter I bought in Shanghai came with two bottles of “codeless” strips, but other strip bottles you can find on AliExpress appear to still be coded. Except instead of a two-digits “code”, they come with a “code chip”, which is pretty much a miniUSB plug connected to something. Which is why they plug is electrically active, but not making any sense when it comes to USB protocol. I have no idea how this idea came though, but I somehow suspect it has to do with miniUSB plugs being really cheap now as nobody want to deal with them.

So back to the latest glucometer I received. I chose this particular model of Sinocare because it had one feature I have never seen on any other meter: a test for uric acid. Now, I have no clue what this is meant to be, and I don’t even pretend I would understand its readings, but it sounded like something I could have at least some fun with. As it turns out this also plays to my idea of figuring out how that coding system works, as despite not needing codes for glucose results, you do need it for the uric acid strips!

The Safe AQ is just as “clunky” as I felt the previous Sannuo to be. And now I have a bit more of an idea of why: they are actually fairly easy to assemble. Unlike the press-fit of most of the “western” designs (terrible name, but it conveys the effect, so please excuse me on this one), these meters are very easy to open up. They even seem to be able to be fixed, if for instance the display was to break. I’m seriously surprised about this. The inside boards are fairly well labelled, too. And very similar between these two otherwise fairly different models. Both meters expose test points for pogo pins under the battery compartment, which are actually properly labelled as well.

Another similarity with the Sannuo, is that this meter – like nearly every meter I could see on AliExpress! – has a spring-loaded ejector for the strips. The box says “automatic” but it just means that you don’t have to touch the strip to throw it away. My best guess is that there’s some cultural significance to this, maybe it’s more common for people to to test someone else’s blood in China, and so the ejector is seen as a big improvement. Or maybe there’s an even stronger disgust with bloodied objects, and the ejector makes things cleaner. I don’t know — if anyone does, please let me know.

Now, how does this work out as a meter? My impression is fairly good overall, but the UX leaves a lot to be desired. The screen is very readable, although not backlit. The accuracy is fairly good when compared with my Libre, both with blood samples and the sensor. But figuring out how to turn it on, and how to change the date/time took a few tries. There’s no feedback that you need to keep pressed the on button for five seconds. But on the other hand the manual has fairly intelligible English, which is probably better than some of the stuff you buy directly on Amazon UK.

There’s a kicker in this whole story of course. Who is Sinocare? You would say that, since I’m always complaining about allowing usage of devices outside their spec, it would be out of character for me to make it easy to find and buy a glucometer that most likely has not been vouched by the local pharmaceutical regulations. And yet I seem to be praising a meter that I got pretty much randomly off AliExpress.

What convinced me to order and write a review about the Sinocare is that, while researching the names I found on AliExpress, I found something very interesting. Sinocare is a Chinese diagnostics company and probably the largest in the country. But they also own Trividia Health, a diagnostic company based in Florida with an UK subsidiary.

Trividia Health was a name that I already knew — they make glucometers called True Metrix, which you can find in USA at Walmart and CVS, and, as I found out more recently, in the UK at Boots. The True Metrix meters don’t seem to share anything, design-wise, with the Sinocare products, but you would expect that the two technology sets are not particularly different.

This also reminds me I need to see if Trividia sells the cradle for the True Metrix Air in the UK. I kept forgetting to try getting one in time to pick it up in the USA during a work trip, and not expecting to be there any time soon sounds like I should try to get one here.

Insulin, routine, lockdown, and electronics

As you may know if you read this blog, I have insulin-dependent diabetes. In particular, I use both fast and long acting insulin, which basically means I need to take a shot of insulin every morning (at around the same time, but there’s at least a bit of leeway around it).

This is not usually a problem: the routine of waking up, getting ready to leave, making a coffee and either drinking it or taking it with me makes it very hard to miss the step “taking the insulin”. Unfortunately, like for many others, this routine is gone out of the window due to the current lockdown. Maybe a bit worse for me since I’m currently still between jobs, which means I don’t even have the routine of logging in to work form home, and of meetings.

What this meant, is that days blurred together, and I started wondering if I remembered to take my insulin in the morning. A few too many times that answer was “I don’t know”, and I think at least twice in the past couple of weeks I did indeed forget. I needed something to make it easier to remember and not to forget.

Because insulin injections tend to be one of those things that I do “in autopilot”, I needed something hard to forget to do. Theoretically, the Libre App allows annotating that you took long-acting insulin (and how much) but that requires me to remember to scan my sensor right after and write down that I did. It’s too easy to forget. I also wanted something that would be a lot more explicit about telling me (and my wife) that I forgot to tell my insulin. And hopefully something that I wouldn’t risk telling I took my insulin too soon in the interaction, and then not actually doing the right thing (as sometimes I reach out for my insulin pen, realise there’s not enough insulin there, and need to pick up a new one from the fridge).

The Trigger: Yes, I Took My Insulin

The first thing I decided to do was to use the spare Flic Button. I bought Flics last year upon suggestion of Luke, and they actually helped immensely — we have one in the study and one in the bedroom, to be able to turn on the smart lights quietly (in the night) and without bothering with the phone apps. We kept a third one “spare”, not quite sure what to use it for until now. The button fits on the back of the cabinet where I keep my “in use” insulin pen. And indeed, it’s extremely easy and obvious to reach while putting the pen down — as an aside, most European insulin pens fit perfectly on a Muji 3-tier slanted display, which is what I’ve been using to keep mine in.

This is not exactly the perfect trigger. The perfect trigger wouldn’t require an action outside of the measured action — so in a perfect world, I would be building something that triggers when I throw an used needle into the needle container. But since that’s a complex project for which I have no obvious solution, I’ll ignore that. I have a trigger, it doesn’t risk getting too much in my way. It should be fine.

But what should the trigger do? The first idea I had was to use IFTTT to create a Google Calendar event when I pressed the button. It wouldn’t be great for notifying if I forgot the insulin, but it would at least allow me to keep track of it. But then I had another idea. I had a spare Adafruit Feather M4 Express, including an AirLift FeatherWing coprocessor for WiFi. I originally bought it to fix an issue with my TV (which I still have not fixed), and considered using it on my art project, but it also has a big bright RGB LED on it (an AdaFruit NeoPixel), which I thought I would use for notifications.

A quick Flask app later, and I had something working — the Flic button would hit one endpoint on the web app, which would record me having taking my insulin, while the Feather would be requesting another endpoint to know how to reconfigure the LED. The webapp would have the logic to turn the LED either red or quiescent depending on whether I got my insulin for the day. There’s a bit of logic in there to define “the day”, as I don’t need the notification at 1am if I have not gone to bed yet (I did say that my routine is messed up didn’t I?) but that’s all minor stuff.

The code for the webapp (Python, Flask) and the Feather (CircuitPython) I pushed to GitHub immediately (because I can), but there’s no documentation for it yet. It also doesn’t use the NeoPixel anymore, which I’ll explain in a moment, so you may not really be able to use it out of the box as it is.

For placement, I involved my wife — I want her to be able to tell whether I didn’t take my insulin, so if I’m having a “spaced out day”, she can remind me. We settled for putting it in the kitchen, close to the kettle, so that it’s clearly visible when making coffee — something we do regularly early in the morning. It worked out well, since we already had an USB power supply in the kitchen, for the electric cheese grater I converted.

Limitations of the Feather Platform.

The Feather platform by itself turned out to be a crummy notification platform. Don’t get me wrong, the ease of using it is extremely nice. I wrote the CircuitPython logic in less than an hour, and that made it very nice. But if you need a clear LED to tell you whether something was done or not, you can’t just rely on the Feather. Or at least not on the Feather M4 Express. Yes it comes with a NeoPixel, but it also comes with two bright, surface-mount LEDs by the sides of the USB connector.

One of the two LEDs is yellow, and connected to the optional LiPo battery charging circuitry, and according to the documentation it’s expected to “flicker at times” — as it turns out, it seems to be continuously flickering for me, to the point at first I thought it was actually the RX/TX notification on the serial port. There’s also a red LED which I thought was just the “power” LED — but that is actually controlled by a GPIO on the board, except it’s pulled high (so turned on) when using the AirLift Wing.

The battery charging LED does appear to behave as documented (only at times flickering) on the M0 Express I ended up getting in addition to the M4. But since that is not compatible with the AirLift (at least using CircuitPython), it might just be that this is also a side-effect of using the AirLift.

Why am I bringing up these LEDs? Well, if you want a notification light that’s either red-or-off, having a bright always-on red LED is a bad idea. Indeed, a day after setting it up this way, my wife asked me if I took my insulin, because she saw the red light in the corner. Yeah it’s too bright — and easy to confuse for the one that you want to check out for.

My first reaction was to desolder the two LEDs — but I have hardly ever desoldered SMD components, and I seem to have fallen for the rookie mistake of trying to desolder them with a solder iron rather than a hot air gun, and actually destroyed the microUSB connector. Oops. A quick order from Mouser meant I had to wait a few days to go back playing with the Feather.

A Better, Funnier Light

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it forced me to take a few steps back and figure out how to make it less likely to confuse the LEDs, beside trying to glue them down with some opaque glue. So instead, I figured out that there’s plenty of RGB LED lamps out there — so why not using those? I ordered a cheap Pikachu from Amazon, which delivered about at the same time as Mouser. I knew it was probably coming from AliExpress (and, spoilers, it pretty much did — only the cardboard looked like printed for the UK market by a domestic company), but ordering it at the source would have taken too long.

The board inside turned out to be fairly well organised, and it was actually much easier to tap into it than expected — except for me forgetting how transistors work, and bridging to the wrong side of the resistor to try turning on the LEDs manually, thus shorting and burning them. I ended up having to pretty much reimplement the same transistor setup outside of the board, but if you do it carefully, you only need three GPIO lines to control the lamp.

The PCB from the RGB LED light I bought. Very well organised. If you want to pair it to a MCU to control it, remove the crossed out IC, then tap into the blue-marked connections. Pay attention to the *side* of the resistor you connect this on!

The LED colour can be varied by PWM, which is fairly easy to do with CircuitPython. You only need to be careful with which GPIO lines you use for it. I used “random” lines when testing on the breadboard, but then wanted to tidy it up using lines 10, 11, and 12 on the finalized board — turns out that line 10 does not appear to have timer capabilities, so you can’t actually use it for PWM. And also, lines 11 and 12 are needed for the AirLift — which means the only lines I could use for this were 5, 6 and 9.

At this point, I had to change the webapp so that instead of turning the LED off to signify I took my insulin, it would instead turn the LEDs yellow, to have a bright and happy Pikachu on the kitchen counter. And an angry red one in the morning until I take my insulin.

Of course to be able to put the lamp in the kitchen next to the kettle, I had to make sure it wouldn’t be just a bunch of boards with cables going back and forth. So first of all, I ended up wiring together a Feather Doubler — which allows a feather (and a wing) to sit side-by-side. The doubler has prototype areas in-between the connectors, which were enough to solder in the three transistors and three resistors — you won’t need those if you don’t burn out the original transistors either!

Unfortunately, because I had stacking headers on my AirLift, even with the cover off, the lamp wouldn’t sit straight. But my wife got the idea of turning the cover inside out, using the space provided by the battery compartment, which worked actually fairly good (it requires some fiddling to make it stable, and I was out of Sugru glue to build a base for it, but for now it’ll work).

Following Up: Alternative Designs and Trimmings

So now I have a working notification light. It works, it turns red in the morning, and turns back yellow after I click the button to signal I took my insulin. It needs a webapp running – and I have been running this on my desktop for now – but that’s good enough for me.

Any improvement from here is pretty much trimming, and trying something new. I might end up getting myself another AirLift and solder the simpler headers on it, to make the profile of the sandwiched board smaller. Or if I am to remake this from an original lamp with working transistors, I could just avoid the problem of the doubler — I would only need GPIO wirings, and could use the prototyping space next to the M4 Express to provide the connection.

I did order a few more lamps in different styles from AliExpress — they will take their due time to show up, and that’s okay. I’ll probably play with them a bit more. I ordered one that (probably) does not have RGB LEDs — it might be interesting to design a “gut replacement” board, that just brings in new LEDs altogether. I ordered one that has “two-colour” images, which likely just means it has two sets of LEDs. I’ll be curious to see how those look like.

I also ordered some ESP32-based “devkits” from AliExpress — this is the same CPU used in the AirLift wing as a WiFi co-processor only, but it’s generally powerful enough that it would be able to run the whole thing off a single processor. This might not be as easy as it sounds to prototype, particularly given that I’m not sure I can just provide the 5V coming from the lamp’s connector to the ESP board (ESP32 uses 3.3V), and I burnt the 3.3V regulator on the lamp’s original board. Also since I need the transistor assembly, I would have to at least get a prototype board to solder everything on and — well, it might just not work out. Still nice to have them in a drawer though.

While I don’t have a 3D printer, and I’m not personally interested in having one at home, and I’m also not going into an office, which may or may not have one (old dayjob did, new dayjob I’m not sure), I might also give a try to software to design a “replacement base” that can fit the Feather, and screw into the rest of the lamp that is already there. It might also be a starting point for designing a version that works with the ESP32 — for that one, you would need the microUSB port from the USB module rather than the one present in the lamp, to go through the on-board regulator. This one is just for the craic, as my Irish friends would say, as I don’t expect that to be needed any time soon.

All in all, I’m happy with what I ended up with. The lamp is cute, and doesn’t feel out of place. It does not need to broadcast to anyone but me and my wife what the situation is. And it turns out to be almost entirely based on Python code that I just released under MIT.

My new friend who reminds me to look after myself!

LibreView online reporting service

You may remember I complained about cloud-based solutions before. I have had harsh words about what are to me irresponsible self-hosting suggestions, and I’m not particularly impressed by how every other glucometer manufacturer appears to want their tools to be used, uploading to their cloud solutions what I would expect is a trove of real-world blood sugar reports from diabetics.

But as it happens, since I’m using the FreeStyle LibreLink app on my phone, I get the data uploaded to Abbott’s LibreView anyway. The LibreView service is geo-restricted, so it might not be available in all the countries where FreeStyle Libre is present, which probably is why the standalone Windows app still exists, and why the Libre 2 does not appear to be supported by it.

I haven’t used the service at all until this past month, when I visited the diabetic nurse at the local hospital (I had some blood sugar control issues), and she asked me to connect with their clinic. Turns out that (with the correct authorization), the staff at the clinic can access the real-time monitoring that I get from the phone. Given that this is useful to me, I find this neat, rather than creepy. Also it seems to require authorization on both sides, and it includes an email notification, so possibly they didn’t do that bad of a job with it.

The site is also a good replacement for the desktop app, when using the app with the phone, rather than the reader. It provides the same level of details in the reports, including the “pattern insights”, and a full view of the day-to-day aligned on weeks. Generally, those reports are very useful. And they are available on the site even for yourself, not just for the clinics, which is nice.

Also it turns out that the app tracks how many phones you’ve been using to scan the sensor — in my case, six. Although it’s over 1⅓ years since I have used a different one. I couldn’t see a way to remove the old phones, but at the same time, they are not reporting anything in and they don’t seem to have a limit on how many you can have.

Overall it’s effectively just a web app version of the information that was already available on the phone (but hard to extract and share) or on the reader (if you are still using that). I like the interface and it seems fairly friendly.

Also, you may remember (or notice, if you read the links above) that I had taken an aside pointing out how Diabetes Ireland misunderstood the graphs shown in the report when the Libre reached Ireland. I guess they were not alone, because in this version of the report Abbott explicitly labels the 10th-90th percentile highlight, the 25th-75th percentile highlight, and the median line. Of course this assumes that whoever is reading the graph is aware of “percentile” and “median” stand for — but that’s at least a huge step in the right direction.

Glucometer Review: beurer GL50 evo

I was looking for a new puzzle to solve after I finally finished with the GlucoRx Nexus (aka TaiDoc TD-4277), so I decided to check out what Boots, being one of the biggest pharmacy in the country, would show on their website under “glucometer”. The answer was the Beurer GL-50, which surprised me because I didn’t know Beurer did glucometers at all. It also was extremely overpriced at £55. But thankfully I found it for £20 at Argos/eBay, so I decided to give it a try.

The reason why I was happy to get one was that the the device itself looked interesting, and reminded me of the Accu-Chek Mobile, with its all-in-one design. While the website calls it a 3-in-1, there are only two components to the device: the meter itself and the lancing device. The “third” device is the USB connector that appears when you disconnect the other two. I have to say that this is a very interesting approach, as it makes it much easier to connect to a computer — if it wasn’t that the size of the meter makes it very hard to connect it.

On my laptop, I can only use it on the USB plug on the right, because on the left, it would cover the USB-C plug I use to charge it. It’s also fairly tall, which makes it hard to use on chargers such as my trusted Anker 5-port USB-C (of which I have five, spread across rooms.) At the end, I had to remove two cables from one of them to be able to charge the meter, which is required for it to be usable at all, when it arrives.

To be honest, I’m not sure if the battery being discharged was normal or due to the fact that the device appears to have been left on shelves for a while: the five sample strips to test the device expire in less than two months. I guess it’s not the kind of device that flies off the shelves.

FreeStyle Libre, gl50 evo, GlucoRx Nexus

So how does the device fare compared to other meters? Size wise, it’s much nicer to handle than the GlucoRx, although it looks bigger than the FreeStyle Libre reader. Part of the reason is that the device, in its default configuration, includes the lancing device, unlike both of the meters I’m comparing it with above. If you don’t plan to use the included lancing device, for instance because you have a favourite lancing device like me (I’m partial to the OneTouch Delica), you can remove the lancing device and hide the USB plug with the alternative provider cap. The meter then takes a much smaller profile than the Libre too. I actually like the compact size better than the spread out one of the FreeStyle Precision Neo.

FreeStyle Libre, gl50 evo (without lancing device), GlucoRx Nexus

Interface-wise, the gl50 is confusingly different from anything I have seen before. It comes with a flush on/off switch on the side, which would be frustrating for most people with short nails, or for people with impeded motion control. Practically, I think this and the “Nexus” are at opposite ends of the scale — the TD-4277 has big, blocky display that can be read without glasses and a single, big button, which makes it a perfect meter for the elderly. The gl50 is frustrating even for me in my thirties.

The flush switch is not the only problem. After you turn it on, the control you have is a wheel, which can be clicked. So you navigate menus in up-down-click. Not very obvious but feasible. But since the wheel can easily be pressed in your purse, that’s why you got the flush switch, I guess. The UI is pretty much barebone but it includes the settings for enabling Bluetooth (with a matching Android app, which I have not checked out for this review yet), and NFC (not sure what for). Worthy of note is that the UI defaults to German, without asking you, and you need to manage to get to the settings in that language to switch to English, Italian, French, or Spanish.

Once you plug it into a computer with Windows, the device appears as a standard CD-Rom UMS device that includes an auto-started “portable” version of the download software, which is a very nice addition, again reminiscent of the Accu-Chek Mobile. It also comes with an installer for the onboard software. As a preview of the technical information post on this meter, it looks like that, similar to the OneTouch Verio, the readings are downloaded through UMS/SCSI packets.

I called out Windows above because I have not checked how this even presents on macOS, and on Linux… it doesn’t. It looks like I may have to take some time to debug the kernel, because what I get on Linux is infinite dmesg spam. I fear the UMS implementation on the meter is missing something, and Linux sends a command that the meter does not recognize.

The software itself is pretty much bland, and there’s nothing really much to say. It does not appear to have a way to even set or get the time for the device, which in my case is still stuck in 2015, because I couldn’t bother yet to roll the wheel all the way to today.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this meter over any of the other meters I have or used. If beurer keeps staying in the market of glucometers (assuming they are making it themselves, rather than rebranding someone else’s, like GlucoRx and Menarini appear to do), then it might be an interesting start of further competition in Europe, which I would actually appreciate.

Glucometer notes: GlucoRx Nexus

This is a bit of a strange post, because it would be a glucometer review, except that I bought this glucometer a year and a half ago, teased a review, but don’t actually remember if I ever wrote any notes for it. While I may be able to get a new feel for the device to write a review, I don’t even know if the meter is still being distributed, and a few of the things I’m going to write here suggest me that it might not be the case, but who knows.

I found the Nexus as an over-the-counter boxed meter at my local pharmacy, in London. To me it appears like the device was explicitly designed to be used by the elderly, not just because of the large screen and numbers, but also because it comes with a fairly big lever to drop out the test strip, something I had previously only seen in the Sannuo meter.

This is also the first meter I see with an always-on display — although it seems that the backlight turns on only when the device is woken up, and otherwise is pretty much unreadable. I guess they can afford this type of display given that the meter is powered by 2 AAA batteries, rather than CR2032 like others.

As you may have guessed by now from the top link about the teased review, this is the device that uses a Silicon Labs CP2110 HID-to-UART adapter, for which I ended up writing a pyserial driver, earlier this year. The software to download the data seems to be available from the GlucoRx website for Windows and Mac — confusingly, the website you actually download the file from is not GlucoRx’s but Taidoc’s. TaiDoc Technology Corporation being named on the label under the device, together with MedNet GmbH. A quick look around suggests TaiDoc is a Taiwanese company, and now I’m wondering if I’m missing a cultural significance around the test strips, or blood, and the push-out lever.

I want to spend a couple notes about the Windows software, which is the main reason why I don’t know if the device is still being distributed. The download I was provided today was for version 5.04.20181206 – which presumes the software was still being developed as of December last year – but it does not seem to be quite tested to work on Windows 10.

The first problem is that that the Windows Defender malware detection tool actually considers the installer itself as malware. I’m not sure why, and honestly I don’t care: I’m only using this on a 90-days expiring Windows 10 virtual machine that barely has access to the network. The other problem, is that when you try to run the setup script (yes, it’s a script, it even opens a command prompt), it tries to install the redistributable for .NET 3.5 and Crystal Reports, fail and error out. If you try to run the setup for the software itself explicitly, you’re told you need to install .NET 3.5, which is fair, but then it opens a link from Microsoft’s website that is now not found and giving you a 404. Oops.

Setting aside these two annoying, but not insurmountable problems, what remains is to figure out the protocol behind the scenes. I wrote a tool that reads a pcapng file and outputs the “chatter”, and you can find it in the usbmon-tools repository. It’s far from perfect and among other things it still does not dissect the actual CP2110 protocol — only the obvious packets that I know include data traffic to the device itself.

This is enough to figure out that the serial protocol is one of the “simplest” that I have seen. Not in the sense of being easy to reverse, but rather in term of complexity of the messages: it’s a ping-pong protocol with fixed-length 8-bytes messages, of which the last one is a simple checksum (sum-modulo-8-bit), a fixed start byte of 0x51, and a fixed end with a bit for host-to-device and device-to-host selection. Adding to the first nibble of the message to always have the same value (2), it brings down the amount of data to be passed for each message to 34-bit. Which is a pretty low amount of information even when looking at simple information as glucose readings.

At any rate, I think I already have a bit of the protocol figured out. I’ll probably finish it over the next few days and the weekend, and then I’ll post the protocol in the usual repository. Hopefully if there are other users of this device they can be well served by someone writing a tool to download the data that is not as painful to set up as the original software.

A FreeStyle Libre Update

The last time I wrote anything interesting about Abbott’s flash glucose monitor (don’t call it a CGM) was when I compared it with the underwhelming Dexcom G6. I thought it would be a good time to provide an update, what with Abbott sending a number of email reminding you to update their FreeStyle LibreLink app in the past couple of weeks.

First of all, there’s the matter of supplies. Back in January, I decided to test Dexcom’s CGM because Abbott’s supply issues bit me in the backside, as I could not get new sensors to keep up with my usage — particularly as the more active life in London with my girlfriend meant losing a couple more sensors to mistakes, such as bumping into the doorframe. For a while, you could only buy three sensors every 25 days, and even then, sometimes the lead time to fulfill the order would be over a week; nowadays this appears to be much better, and the time limit for the orders was removed recently.

Since I was not particularly thrilled to switch to the Dexcom G6, I had to find a way around these limits, beside counting on the two extra sensors I “gained” by not using the Libre for a month. Luck was that a friend of my girlfriend found the Libre sensors on sale in a brick-and-mortar store in Sharjah, and managed to send me six of them. The store had no limits on how many sensors you could buy, despite the FreeStyle UK website only allowing orders of three at most, and only to already-established customers.

The UAE-bought sensors are effectively the same as the British ones, with the same manufacturing information printed on them, and even similar enough lot numbers. The most visible difference is that the two alcohol-soaked tissues, provided for cleaning the insertion point, are missing.

The other difference is not visible in the packaging, or indeed on the hardware itself: the sensors are region-locked. Or maybe we should say that the app is. As it is, my (UK) FreeStyle LibreLink install did not want to set up the UAE-bought sensors. The reader device had no such concern and both initialised and read them just fine. I was originally a bit concerned and spot-checked the values with fingersticks, but it looked like there was no issue with the sensors at all.

I’ve been wondering just how much the supply problem connects with the region locking. Or just how fine-grained the region locking is: my Irish sensors worked perfectly fine with the UK app, although by that point, the app was not available in Ireland at all. But possibly all of these problems are gone.

Now, to go back to Abbott’s email messages to update their LibreLink app. The reason for this update is not much about the UI of the app itself – although that did change a bit, in subtle and annoying ways – but rather a change in their algorithm for turning the sensors’ readings into a human-understandable blood glucose reading. The “curve”, as it’s sometimes referred to. It’s important to note that what the sensors communicate with either the app or the reader device are not “fully cooked” blood sugar readings, but rather a set of different sensors reading, and that the app and reader will then apply some formulas to provide an equivalent reading to a fingerstick.

Much more interesting to me, in the announcement of the new curve, is that they also suggest users to update the firmware of reader devices to make use of the new fine-tuned algorithm. This is interesting because it makes the FreeStyle Libre the first glucometer with an upgradeable firmware. I have not actually run the update myself, yet. It needs to be done just before changing the sensor, as the reader will forget about its last sensor at that point, and I’m a bit worried that it might not work with UAE-bought sensors anymore after that. So I’m instead waiting to finish the supply of those sensors, and maybe get another one later to test after the update.

I also want to try to get a usbmon trace of the whole procedure for the firmware update. I’m not sure when Abbott will ever publish another update for the reader, but at least starting collecting the protocol would be interesting. Once I do that, you can expect another blog post on the topic.

And as a final note, glucomterutils is being updated as I type this to support reading and setting patient names. While I would not suggest people to use that field for their own personal glucometer, I thought it would be nice to provide the building block for more doctor-focused apps to be built out of it. As a reminder, the code is released under the MIT license, because using it to build something else is a primary focus of it — we need better tooling for glucometers, and not just in the Free Software world, but in the world in general!

Dexcom G6: new phone and new sensor

In the previous posts on the Dexcom G6, I’ve talked about the setup flow and the review after a week, before the first sensor expired. This was intentional because I wanted to talk about the sensor replacement flow separately. Turns out this post will also have a second topic to it, which came by by chance: how do you reconfigure the app when you change phone or, like it happened to me this time, when you are forced to do a factory reset.

I won’t go into the details of why I had to do a factory reset. I’ll just say that the previous point about email and identities was involved.

So what happens when the Dexcom is installed on a new phone, or when you have to reinstall this? The first thing it will ask you is to login again, which is the easy part. After that, though, it will ask you to scan the sensor code. Which made no sense to me! I said “No Code”, and then it asked me to scan the transmitter code. At which point it managed to pair with the transmitter, and it showed me the blood sugar readings for the past three hours. I can assume this is the amount of caching the transmitter can do. If the data is at all uploaded to Dexcom system, it is not shown back to the user beside those three hours.

It’s important to note here that unless you are at home (and you kept the box the transmitter came with), or you have written down the transmitter serial number somewhere, you won’t be able to reconnect. You need the transmitter serial number for the two of them to pair. To compare again this to the LibreLink app, that one only requires you to log in with your account, and the current sensor can just be scanned normally. Calibration info is kept online and transmitted back as needed.

A few hours later, the first sensor (not the transmitter) finally expired and I prepared myself to set the new one up. The first thing you see when you open the app after the sensor expired is a “Start new Sensor” button. If you click that, you are asked for the code of the sensor, with a drawing of the applicator that has the code printed on the cover of the glue pad. If you type in the code, the app will think that you already set up the whole sensor and it’s ready to start, and will initiate the countdown of the warm up. At no point the app direct you to apply the new sensor. It gives you the impression you need to first scan the code and then apply the sensor, which is wrong!

Luckily despite this mistake, I was able to tell the app to stop the sensor by telling it I’d be replacing transmitter. And then re-enrolling the already present transmitter. This is all completely messed up in the flow, particularly because when you do the transmitter re-enrolment, the steps are in the correct order: scan then tell you to put the transmitter in, and then scan the transmitter serial number (again, remember to keep the box). It even optionally shows you the explanation video again — once again, totally unlike just starting a new sensor.

To say that this is badly thought out is an understatement to me. I’ll compare this again with the LibreLink app that, once the sensor terminates, actually shows you the steps to put on a new sensor (you can ignore them and go straight to scanning the sensor if you know what you’re doing).

On the more practical side, the skin adhesive that I talked about last week actually seems to work fine to keep the sensor in place better, and it makes dealing with my hairy belly simpler by bunching up the hair and keep it attached to the skin, rather than having it act as a fur against the sensor’s glue. It would probably be quite simpler to put on if they provided a simpler guide on the size of the sensor though: showing it on the video is not particularly nice.

The sensor still needed calibration: the readings were off by more than 20% at first, although they are now back on track. This either means the calibration is off in general, or somehow there’s a significant variation between the value read by the Dexcom sensor and the actual blood sugar. I don’t have enough of a medical background to be able to tell this, so I leave that to the professionals.

At this point, my impression of the Dexcom G6 system is that it’s a fairly decent technical implementation of the hardware, but a complete mess on the software and human side. The former, I’m told can be obviated by using a third-party app (by the folks who are not waiting), which I will eventually try at this point for the sake of reviewing it. The latter, probably would require them to pay more attention to their competitors.

Abbott seems to have the upper-hand with the user-friendly apps and reports, even though there are bugs and their updates are very far in between. They also don’t do alerts, and despite a few third-party “adapters” to transform the Libre “flash” system into a more proper CGM, I don’t think there will be much in the form of reliable alerts until Abbott changes direction.

Dexcom G6: week 1 review

Content warning, of sorts. I’m going to talk about my experience with the continuous glucose monitor I’m trying out. This will include some PG-rated body part descriptions, so if that makes you awkward to read, consider skipping this post.

It has now been a week since I started testing out the Dexcom G6 CGM. And I have a number of opinions, some of which echo what I heard from another friend using the Dexcom before, and some that confirmed the suggestion of another friend a few years back. So let me share some of it.

The first thing we should talk about is the sensor, positioning and stickiness. As I said in the previous post, their provided options for the sensor positioning are not particularly friendly. I ended up inserting it on my left side, just below the belly button, away from where I usually would inject insulin. It did not hurt at all, and it’s not particularly in the way.

Unfortunately, I’m fairly hairy and that means that the sensor has trouble sticking by itself. And because of that, it becomes a problem when taking showers, as the top side of the adhesive strip tends to detach, and I had to stick it with bandage tape. This is not a particular problem with the Libre, because my upper back arm is much less hairy and even though it can hurt a bit to take it off, it does not hurt that much.

As of today, the sensor is still in, seventh day out of ten, although it feels very precarious right now. During one of the many videos provided during the original setup, they suggest that, to makes it more stable to stick, I should be using skin adhesive. I had no idea what that was, and it was only illustrated as a drawing of a bottle. I asked my local pharmacy, and they were just as confused. Looking up on their supplier’s catalogue, they found something they could special order, and which I picked up today. It turns out to be a German skin adhesive for £15, which is designed for urinary sheaths. Be careful if you want to open the page, it has some very graphical imagery. As far as I can tell, it should be safe to use for this use case, but you would expect that Dexcom would at least provide some better adhesive themselves, or at least a sample in their introductory kit.

I will also have to point out that the bulge caused by the sensor is significantly more noticeable than the Libre, particularly if you have tight-fitting shirts, like I often do in the summer. Glad I listened to the colleague who thought it would look strange on me, back a few years ago.

Let’s now talk about the app, which I already said before was a mess to find on the store. The app itself looks bare bones — not just for the choice of few, light colours (compare to the vivid colours of LibreLink), but also due to the lack of content altogether: you get a dial that is meant to show you the current reading, as well as the direction of the reading between “up fast” and “down fast”, then a yellow-grey-red graph of the last three hours. You can rotate the phone (or expect the app to read it as a rotation despite you keeping your phone upright) to see the last 24 hours. I have not found any way to show you anything but that.

The app does have support for “sharing/following”, and it does ask you if you want to consent to data sharing. Supposedly there’s an online diabetes management site — but I have not found any link of where that is from the app. I’ll probably look that up for another post.

You’ll probably be wondering why I’m not including screenshots like I did when I reviewed the Counter Next One. The answer is that the app prevents screenshots, which means you either share your data via their own apps, or you don’t at all. Or you end up with taking a picture of one phone with another one, which I could have, but I seriously couldn’t be bothered.

The Settings menu is the only interaction you can actually spend time on, with the app. It’s an extremely rudimentary page with a list of items name-value pairs effectively. Nothing tells you which rows are clickable and which ones aren’t. There’s a second page for Alerts, and then a few more Alerts have their own settings page.

Before I move onto talking (ranting?) about alerts, let me take a moment to talk about the sensors’ lifetime display. The LibreLink app has one of the easiest-to-the-eyes implementation of the lifetime countdown. It shows as a progress bar of days once you start the sensor, and once you reach the last day, it switches to show you the progress bar for the hours. This is very well implemented and deals well with both timezone changes (I still travel quite a bit) and daylight savings time. The Dexcom G6 app shows you the time the sensor will end with no indication of which timezone is taken in.

The main feature of a CGM like this, that pushes data, rather than being polled like the Libre, is the ability to warn you of conditions that would be dangerous, like highs and lows. This is very useful particularly if you have a history of lows and you got desensitised to them. That’s not usually my problem, but I have had a few times where I got surprised by a low because I was too focused on a task, so I was actually hoping it would help me. But it might not quite be there.

First of all, you only get three thresholds: Urgent Low, Low and High. The first one cannot be changed at all:

The Urgent Low Alarm notification level and repeat setting cannot be changed or turned off. Only the sound setting can be changed.

The settings are locked at 3.1mmol/L and 30 minutes repeat, which would be fairly acceptable. Except it’s more like 10 minutes instead of 30, which is extremely annoying when you actually do get an urgent low, and you’re trying to deal with it. Particularly in the middle of the night. My best guess of why the repeat is not working is that any reading that goes up or stays stable resets the counter of warning, so a (3.1, 3.2, 3.1) timeseries would cause two alerts 10 minutes apart.

The Low/High thresholds are used both for the graph and for the alert. If you can’t see anything wrong with this, you never had a doctor tell you to stay a little higher rather than a little lower on your blood glucose. I know, though, I’m not alone with this. In my “usual” configuration, I would consider anything below 5 as “out of range”, because I shouldn’t linger at that value too long. But I don’t want a “low” alert at that value, I would rather have an alert if I stayed at that value for over 20 minutes.

I ended up disabling the High alert, because it was too noisy even with my usual value of 12 — particularly for the same reason noted above about the timeseries problem: even when I take some fast insulin to bring the value down, there will be another alert in ten minutes because the value is volatile enough. It might sounds perfectly reasonable to anyone who has not been working with monitoring and alerting for years, but to me, that sounds like a pretty bad monitoring system.

You can tweak the alerts a little bit for overnight alerts, but you can’t turn them off entirely. Urgent Low will stay on, and that has woken me up a few nights already. Turns out I have had multiple cases of overnight mild lows (around 3.2 mmol/L), that recover themselves without me waking up. Is this good? Bad? I’m not entirely sure. I remember they used to be more pronounced years ago, and that’s why my doctor suggested me to run a little higher. The problem with those lows, is that if you try too hard to recover from them quickly, you end up with scary highs (20mmol/L and more!) in the morning. And since there’s no “I know, I just got food”, or “I know, I just got insulin” to shut up the alerts for an hour or half, you end up very frustrated at the end of the day.

There is a setting that turns on the feature called “Quick Glance”, which is a persistent notification showing you the current glucose level, and one (or two) arrows determining the trend. It also comes with a Dexcom icon, maybe out of necessity (Android apps are not my speciality), which is fairly confusing because the Dexcom logo is the same as the dial that shows the trend in the app, even though in this notification it does not move. And, most importantly, it stays green as the logo even when the reading is out of range. This is extremely annoying, as the “quick glance” to the colour, while you’re half asleep, would give you the totally wrong impression. On the bright side, the notification also has an expanded view that shows you the same 3 hours graph as the app itself would, so you rarely if ever see the app.

Finally, speaking of the app, let me bring up the fact that it appears to use an outrageous amount of memory. Since I started using the Dexcom, I end restarting Pokémon Go every time I switch between it and WhatsApp and Viber, on a Samsung S8 phone that should have enough RAM to run all of this in the background. This is fairly annoying, although not a deal breaker for me. But I wouldn’t be surprised if someone using a lower-end phone would have a problem trying to use this, and would have to pay the extra £290 (excluding VAT) for the receiver (by comparison, the Libre reader, which doubles as a standard glucometer – including support for β-ketone sticks – costs £58 including VAT).

Since I just had to look up the price of the reader, I also have paid a little more attention to the brochure they sent me when I signed up to be contacted. One of the thing it says is:

Customize alerts to the way you live your life (day vs night, week vs weekend).

The “customization” is a single schedule option, which I set up for night, as otherwise I would rarely be able to sleep without it waking me up every other night. That means you definitely cannot customize them the way you live your life. For instance, there’s nothing to help you use this meter while going to the movies: there’s no way to silence the alerts for any amount of time (some alerts are explicitly written so that Android’s Do Not Disturb do not block them!), there’s no silent-warning option, which would have been awesome together with the watch support (feel the buzz, check the watch, see a low—drink the soda, see a high—get the insulin/tablet).

A final word I will spend on the calibration. I was aware of the Dexcom at its previous generation (G5) required calibration during setup. As noted last week, this version (G6) does not require that. On the other hand, you can type in a calibration value, which I ended up doing for this particular sensor, as I was worried about the >20mmol/L readings it was showing me. Turns out they were not completely outlandish, but they were over 20% off. A fingerstick later, and a bit of calibration, seem to be enough for it to report a more in-line value.

Will I stick to the Dexcom G6 over the Libre? I seriously doubt so by now. It does not appear to match my usage patterns, it seems to be built for a different target audience, and it lacks any of the useful information and graphs that the LibreLink app provides. It also is more expensive and less nice to wear. Expect at least one more rant if I can figure out how to access my own readings on their webapp.

Testing the Dexcom G6 CGM: Setup

I have written many times before how I have been using the FreeStyle Libre “flash” glucose monitor, and have been vastly happy with it. Unfortunately in the last year or so, Abbott has had trouble with manufacturing capacity for the sensors, and it’s becoming annoying to procure them. Once already they delayed my order to the point that I spent a week going back to finger-pricking meters, and it looked like I might have to repeat that when, earlier in January, they notified that my order would be delayed.

This time, I decided to at least look into the alternatives — and as you can guess from the title, I have ordered a Dexcom G6 system, which is an actual continuous monitor, rather than a flash system like the Libre. For those who have not looked into this before (or who, lucky them, don’t suffer from diabetes and thus don’t spend time looking like this), the main difference between these two is that the Libre needs to be scanned regularly, while the G6 sends the data continuously from the transmitter to a receiver of some kind.

I say “of some kind” because, like the Libre, and unlike the generation I looked at before, the G6 can be connected to a compatible smartphone instead of a dedicated receiver. Indeed, the receiver is a costly optional here, considering that already the starter kit is £159 (plus VAT, which I’m exempt from because I’m diabetic).

Speaking of costs, Dexcom takes a different approach to ordering than the Libre: it’s overly expensive if you “pay as you go”, the way Abbott does it. Instead if you don’t want to be charged through the nose, you need to accept a one year contract, for £159/month. It’s an okay price, barely more expensive than the equivalent Abbott sensors price, but it’s definitely a bit more “scary” as an option. In particular if you don’t feel sure about the comfort of the sensor, for instance.

I’m typing this post as I opened the boxes that arrived to me with the sensor, transmitter and instructions. And the first thing I will complain about is that the instructions tell me to “Set Up App”, and give me the name of the app and its icon, but provides no QR code or short link to it. So I looked at their own FAQ, they only provide the name of the app:

The Dexcom G6 app has to be downloaded and is different from the Dexcom G5 Mobile app. (Please note: The G6 system will not work with the G5 Mobile app.) It is available for free from the Apple App or Google Play stores. The app is named “Dexcom G6”

Once I actually find the app, that is reported as being developed by Dexcom, I actually find Dexcom G6 mmol/L DXCM1. What on Earth, folks? Yes of course the mmol/l is there because it’s the UK edition (the Italian edition would be mg/dl), and DXCM1 is probably… something. But this is one of the worst way to dealing with region-restricted apps.

Second problem: the login flow uses an in-app browser, as it’s clear from the cookies popup (that is annoying on their normal website too). Worse, it does not work with 1Password auto-fill! Luckily they don’t disable paste at least.

After logging in, the app forces you to watch a series of introductory videos, otherwise you don’t get to continue the setup at all. I would hope that this is only a requirement for the first time you use the app, but I somewhat don’t expect it to be as good. The videos are a bit repetitive, but I suppose they are designed to help people who are not used to this type of technology. I think it’s of note that some of the videos are vertical, while other are horizontal, forcing you to move your phone quite a few times.

I find it ironic that the videos suggests you to keep using a fingerstick meter to take treatment decisions. The Libre reader device doubles as a fingerstick meter, while Dexcom does not appear to even market one to begin with.

I have to say I’m not particularly impressed by the process, let alone the opportunities. The video effectively tells you you shouldn’t be doing anything at all with your body, as you need to place it definitely on your belly, but away from injection sites, from where you could have a seatbelt, or from where you may roll over while asleep. But I’ll go with it for now. Also, unlike the Libre, the sensors don’t come with the usual alcohol wipes, despite them suggesting you to use it and have it ready.

As I type this, I just finished the (mostly painless, in the sense of physical pain) process to install the sensor and transmitter. The app is now supposedly connecting with the (BLE) transmitter. The screen tells me:

Keep smart device within 6 meters of transmitter. Pairing may take up to 30 minutes.

It took a good five minutes to pair. And only after it paired, the sensor can be started, which takes two hours (compare to the 1 hour of the Libre). Funnily enough, Android SmartLock asked if I wanted to use to keep my phone unlocked, too.

Before I end this first post, I should mention that there is also a WearOS companion app — which my smartwatch asked if I wanted to install after I installed the phone app. I would love to say that this is great, but it’s implemented as a watch face! Which makes it very annoying if you actually like your watch face and would rather just have an app that allowed you to check your blood sugar without taking out your phone during a meeting, or a date.

Anyhoo, I’ll post more about my experience as I get further into using this. The starter kit is a 30 days kit, so I’ll probably be blogging more during February while this is in, and then finally decide what to do later in the year. I now have supplies for the Libre for over three months, so if I switch, that’ll probably happen some time in June.