We live in a tech-obsessed world, and there’s an abundance of technology on the market to administer diabetes.
Combining knowledge, technology and data may also help empower you to make the very best decisions in your diabetes and body.
Beyond Insulin Pumps, What Diabetes Technology Helps Manage Your Diabetes?
Smart Insulin Pens
Multiple every day injections (MDIs) are available in many forms—the oldest of which is the nice old-fashioned syringe and vial of insulin.
For many individuals, nonetheless, MDIs involve using a smart insulin pen.
Smart insulin pens are a technology that helps manage your diabetes. Smart insulin pens are helpful in that they assist people take the fitting amount of insulin at the fitting time to forestall insulin stacking.
(Insulin stacking is when someone takes doses of fast-acting insulin at close intervals to lower high blood sugar.)
Smart insulin pens offer a bunch of advantages to individuals with diabetes, and might work in tandem with a phone app, where users can:
- Track insulin on board/energetic insulin in your bloodstream
- Personalize their insulin doses
- Sync with their continuous glucose monitor (CGM) or glucometer data, and
- Share reports with others
Smart insulin pens also:
- Offer reminders—so that you don’t forget to take your insulin
- Track how much insulin you’ve already administered—and while you took it
- Help prevent people from overdosing—or overlapping —insulin doses
- Connect with fitness apps and trackers—including apps that may generate every day time in range (TiR) reports and every day insulin usage
- Track insulin temperature to forestall you from taking spoiled insulin
- Are compatible with most short- and long-acting insulins—and can even dose in half units.
Smart insulin pens available in the US include:
Continuous Glucose Monitor Data
In terms of technology that helps manage diabetes, continuous glucose monitor (CGM) data may be very powerful.
Small, externally worn CGM devices might be used as an alternative of manual blood-sugar testing, and include:
CGMs require little or no input from the user and have been proven to help improve blood sugar and A1C levels.
In contrast to manual blood-sugar checks, a CGM robotically tests the interstitial fluid (fluid present in the spaces around cells) and approximates a blood-sugar level each one to 5 minutes.
CGMs also show trend lines. When you notice patterns, you may adjust your medications to raised stay on top of your management.
You may also set low- and high-blood-sugar alarms that can wake you up in the midst of the night so that you treat blood-sugar levels before they grow to be dangerously low or high.
Although steadily worn together with an insulin pump (and even in an integrated system with automatic insulin dosing), many individuals use CGMs together with MDI and find improvement of their blood-sugar levels.
CGM Data Apps
The info from CGMs might be overwhelming, but several apps can take your blood-sugar data and make it more digestible and simple to know.
Two of the preferred CGM data apps are the Freestyle LibreLink App and The Dexcom Clarity App.
Freestyle LibreLink App
The Freestyle LibreLink App can robotically assist you to track every day and weekly patterns by generating pattern reports to assist fine-tune your diabetes management much more.
A every day patterns graph can show the variability of blood-sugar levels over multiple hours and days and time in goal.
Learning what your blood-sugar patterns are and the way your body reacts to certain foods, stress and exercise can assist you to modify your every day habits and help prevent high and low-blood-sugar levels before they even occur.
Dexcom Clarity App
The Dexcom Clarity App also offers a bevy of data for users of their system, including:
The app can show average blood sugar levels over a two-, seven-, 14-, 30- or 90-day span.
The Dexcom Clarity App can even directly communicate together with your healthcare team, so you may make meal, exercise, and drugs adjustments in real time—improving your diabetes and overall health much more!
Food Apps
Learning what to eat generally is a difficult challenge while you live with diabetes.
Technology, nonetheless, is here to assist!
MyNetDiary
MyNetDiary is a preferred app that has a searchable database with nearly one million food entries and carbohydrate counts for people to access.
When you follow a particular food regimen or want to lose or maintain weight or muscle mass, MyNetDiary can create a food regimen plan to satisfy your needs.
This may also help empower you when eating meals with family or friends, having all of your carbohydrate-counting needs right at your fingertips.
Snaq
Snaq helps users count carbohydrates of their meals with a snap of their phone’s camera. It also helps take the guesswork out of meal-time insulin boluses to make more data-driven decisions and to bring more peace of mind, freedom, and alternative to individuals with diabetes.
With Snaq, the user takes an image of a snack or meal and gets dietary information.
Nevertheless, there are limitations (blurry photos, homemade foods, and secret sauces can still trip up the information).
Snaq users can add notes to a meal and graph trends. You may also view and save time-in-range data for various meals, which may assist you to higher learn what foods and meals your body reacts to over time.
In Addition to Using Technology to Manage Your Diabetes, Persist with the Basics
Along with all the most recent technology attempting to make life with diabetes a bit easier, it’s at all times necessary to also follow the fundamentals of fine diabetes management.
This includes:
- Routinely taking your prescription medications
- Testing your blood-sugar levels daily
- Often seeing your doctor
- Maintaining a healthy diet, balanced meals
- Staying hydrated with water
- Getting regular exercise and physical activity
- Practicing stress management
- Aiming for adequate sleep
- Looking for social and community support
Technology has moved diabetes management very far in recent times.
Use it to your advantage to assist encourage and motivate you to take your diabetes management to the following level!
This content was made possible by Tempo, an energetic partner of Beyond Type 1 on the time of publication.