If you’re diabetic, monitoring your blood sugar on a regular basis is an annoying but necessary part of your daily routine.
Thankfully, Dexcom, a manufacturer of medical devices, is giving diabetics the ability to more easily monitor, track and share their blood glucose (BG) readings. Dexcom has developed an app for the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch that will show readings from users’ glucose monitors and allow them to share the data with their endocrinologists and other medical professionals.
Jorge Valdes, the chief technical officer of Dexcom, told the Daily Dot that the Food and Drug Administration approved the company’s data-sharing capability, which allows diabetics to share their blood sugar levels remotely through a Bluetooth-enabled ecosystem that connects through mobile devices.
The goal, Valdes said, is to strive and make the process of measuring blood glucose simple yet highly accurate. While many approaches have been tried—using a patient’s saliva or tear ducts—to provide accurate BG readings, none have come close to providing the accuracy of subcutaneous measurement, Valdes added.
Here’s how it works: The user wears a glucose monitor, which uses a small sensor inserted under the skin to check glucose levels. A wireless handheld companion device from Dexcom provides a readout screen to track the data output from the glucose monitor. The handheld unit connects to an app on the Apple Smart Watch, which then sends the user’s information to the cloud, where it’s shared with doctors and other health-care professionals.
Although Valdes says at some point, the company hopes to be able to eliminate the need for the hand-held remote tracking device, as of now the device seems somewhat cumbersome and difficult to use. Still, a device that gives you the ability to easily share blood glucose information with doctors is a vital step to providing better care for diabetics.
H/T Gigaom | Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman
