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.