If you are wondering about commercialization, you can get into (US, can't speak for other countries!) regulatory weeds pretty quickly, especially if your commercial plan involves informing clinicians.
That isn't close to a naming collision in a legal/trademark sense. Neither the "mate" of "Sugarmate" nor the "Glu" ooh ooh ooh nearness to "Glooko" is close enough to be actionable (in the US, anyway, but in this kind of thing what else matters ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯).
Disclaimer: IANAL but have substantial experience with anally-extracted objections to naming (and other things)
Sugarmate is awesome! In fact we just got an automated phone call at 5am from Sugarmate letting us know our son’s sugar was low. It’s a killer feature.
So naming collisions can happen as long as they are in separate domains.
If your brand is too close to another, are you causing confusion?
If you went to the store and saw on the shelf:
- NutriBlend (Parent Co NutriCo)
- NutriActive (Parent Co NutriCo)
- NutriSport (Parent Co Athletic Treats Inc)
Could you think that NutriSport was a product of NutriCo? If so, thats the part the governments care about. They want people to be able to trust in commerce, to maximize tax revenue.
What's the easiest/cheapest way to obtain a continuous glucose monitor for someone curious about how blood glucose level correlates with subjective well-being and diet/exercise behaviors, but without a medical need for it?
I tried Veri for a couple of months. Works exactly as advertised, gave me whatever insight there was to get out of glucose monitoring for a healthy individual, 10/10 would do it again. The review linked by somebody above is accurate (especially about their team being nice), so you can probably consider the reviews for the other apps as also being accurate and make your pick. But for a no-fuss good option, Veri is definitely ok.
As for insights gained... pretty much everything "they" say is true. The order of how you eat foods matter. Fibers, protein, fat, alcohol and movement all lower glucose levels.
In the U.S. you do need a prescription to purchase one.
You can just talk to your primary care doctor and tell them you're interested in getting one to screen for prediabetes, or to help you with weight loss. There's a good chance it won't be covered by insurance if you are not diabetic or taking insulin, but as long as you have the prescription you can pay out of pocket.
No, there are now CGMs that are available without a prescription as an assistive device for sports. You're not supposed to use those for medical purposes, but you can get them without a prescription.
> There is only a needle in the applicator, and it’s very very tiny. It only hurts for like half a second and only if you’re extremely sensitive to pain like I am.
It's worth noting that this varies. The G6 that I have _generally_ doesn't hurt. But...
- Sometimes it hurts "somewhat" (like someone punched me, but in a small area) and that pain goes away over the course of a day or so. This tends to correspond with there being a fair amount of blood leakage when attaching it (it sometimes pools underneath the sensor).
- Sometimes it just... itches. This is worse than the pain. It tends to last several days, sometimes the entire 10 days. It's rare, but it's super annoying when it happens.
I will point out that I LOVE my glucose monitor. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I say it changed my life when I got it. I'm safer now; I'm old enough that I'm resistant to the signs of low blood sugar, and I've had instances of standing up from a chair and just collapsing because my blood was low (pre-monitor). And I've learned SO much about how my body reacts to various foods; I'm better equipped to eat smartly now.
The Libre sensor can be purchased without a prescription, and used with a free smartphone app. This link is for the V3 sensor. I bought the older 14-day sensors from this mail order pharmacy while I was using them. Cheaper than my local pharmacy or many other sources, even with shipping cost.
Libre is very good but I unfortunately developmed an allergy to the glue they use. So you have to test and see.
Also these devices have a bias and a drift and are useful for trending, not for exact results all the time. However to monitor how blood sugar trends semi-quantitatively and identify which foods cause how much spike etc, more than sufficient.
Flonase applied to the skin with a hydrocolloid bandage (we use Dynaderm) on top, then apply the freestyle on top of that.
A lot of people are very allergic to freestyle's adhesive. The above is the common way to deal with it. Like there is a whole facebook group filled with thousands of people on the topic.
I developed a reaction to Dexcom adhesive after a few months of use. It slowly got worse to the point where I couldn’t leave one on for more than 4-5 days and it would leave a welt that took 15 days to heal. I haven’t ever used Flonase but the hydrocolloid does a great job. I wouldn’t be able to use them at all otherwise (and I have type 1 diabetes, so it’s important).
I'd be extreemly careful about using a cell phone app to track any health data at all. The Glucomate app seems to have a pretty reasonable privacy policy at first glance, but I have no idea what kind of app the The Libre uses or what their policy is, but in any case it's worth pointing out that there are countless companies who would love to get their hands on this type of data some of which could impact your ability to get insurance or the rates you'll pay for it. Even advertisers would love to take advantage of you while your levels are (or are expected to be) low and your defenses are down.
If insurance companies are setting premiums based on personally collected data from random apps, the thing to do isn't to advise people to avoid them, the thing to do is to figure out how to feed the random apps data that looks healthy.
Of course health insurance isn't allowed to consider such data, and it's unlikely to be of much value to life insurance (because it has no provenance).
For a very long time insurance companies have been using information collected from data brokers and who knows where that data comes from. I'm guessing they'll use any data they can get their hands on that might in any way help them justify taking more of your money while ignoring or downplaying the rest, but gaming your data wouldn't be a terrible idea if you can pull it off.
> Insurers contend that they use the information to spot health issues in their clients — and flag them so they get services they need. And companies like LexisNexis say the data shouldn't be used to set prices. But as a research scientist from one company told me: "I can't say it hasn't happened." (https://www.propublica.org/article/health-insurers-are-vacuu...)
There now seems to exist an app that can read Libre 3 and feed to Xdrip, APS. I want to try it soon. Unfortunately you still need the official spy app to initialize the sensor.
for libre 2 if you use the bluetooth mode. You actually would install the libre app for initialization and then deinstall it so that it doesn't interfere.
A 30-day supply of Dexcom G6 sensors is 300-450 in the US without insurance, and you also need a transmitter that lasts 90 days, which is about 150. Best I've used is Costco, about $320, but I saw a cheaper price though Amazon, under $200.
The websites I linked above show prices in the $60 range for Freestyle Libre 3.
I have mine by prescription, so I get them through Walgreens and my insurance covers the majority of the cost. So, this isn't a problem for me. But you can get them relatively cheaply.
I’m slightly pre-diabetic, and that ended up being enough for my insurance to be willing to pay. I have a one year Rx for Libre 2 sensors and have paid about $40/mo based on my copay.
A lot of people are claiming you need a prescription to purchase one; that is actually untrue in practice. You need a prescription to get insurance to pay for it but there are plenty of websites that sell dexcom (the best kind) devices dtc. Just search “dexcom purchase” on your favorite search engine. You’ll have to spend several hundred dollars though. Also there are services like levels or January.ai which white-label Abbott devices and handle all the prescription stuff for you.
Also there are services like levels or January.ai which white-label Abbott devices and handle all the prescription stuff for you.
Levels ships the Dexcom G6 currently (they have another option to get the Libre) if you aren't T1 or T2. It's not even while labeled, when you join levels your shipment comes in a Levels box but everything inside is in Dexcom packaging. You are even required to use the Dexcom app in conjunction with the Levels app (which can get really annoying because the Dexcom app, understandably assuming you are diabetic, emits LOUD alerts that you can't disable through your phone if your blood glucose reading would be problematic for someone that is diabetic.)
Can confirm. Just at this moment I have a Dexcom G7 attached to my arm and I don't even have diabetes. Just using it to learn a little bit about my blood glucose patterns.
But these devices are not really built for non-diabetics. There is a constant barrage of alerts as my blood sugar regularly dips into hypoglycemic levels. I feel fine but the device purposefuly does not have any way to disable the alarm.
You can adjust the alerts a little bit. If you are actually going below 60 on a regular basis then you are hypoglycemic and the alerts are probably useful. It’s possible that your readings were slightly off though. Thanks for driving down prices for the rest of us! Keep on ordering em, big spender! I mean that.
My blood sugar goes below 60 but I am not hypoglycemic and no, the alerts are not useful. And yes, the measurements are correct -- I have more than one way to measure blood sugar level.
Hypoglycemic means your body is dependant on sugar, can't get sugar and has adverse reaction to it.
My body can't get sugar, true, but is not dependant on it (fat adapted) and I have no reaction to it.
As I have not eaten any carbs for about two months any notion of hypoglycemia due to not eating sugar is a bit meaningless.
I know people who get much, much lower blood sugar levels and feel fine. The levels they get would (below 40? below 30?) would be lethal to "normal" person, if sugar addiction can be called normal at all. But they all feel fine and are probably healthier than most.
I put CGM on my arm to learn how my blood sugar levels look when on my diet and then what happens when I switch carbs back on -- I expect my body to "freak out" a little bit and then stabilise within couple of days and that's what I would like to see in a bit clearer detail using my CGM.
As to driving the prices down... nah, I am not making a dent. These devices are too expensive to use regularly even for me (software devs salary). I will just put a couple of them to learn a bit about myself and then stop when I got what I needed.
Very interesting experiments as a data nerd would love to see a write up about how your diet effected your sugar. I know it's unlikely you will publish it but if you would I'd love to read it.
It is interesting but my data is useless. I lost over 70 pounds since July last year but I don't have any good record of blood sugar measurements. I did measurements whenever I liked either to confirm I am in ketosis or just to check my blood sugar / ketone levels in response to how I felt or to check how much various meals raised my sugar. But I did not keep any log.
There is couple things I learned. When you are on a strict ketogenic diet your blood sugar pretty much stays the same throughout the day. Even if I eat one huge meal for entire day, my sugar after the meal is pretty much the same as before the meal or within 10mg/dL. My exercise and circadian rhythm affect sugar more than meals.
Given this I wonder if it is possible at least for some people with diabetes to skip carbs completely and live carb-free but also insulin-free life.
Another thing I learned is that as I started my first keto month, your blood sugar starts dropping, then goes back up after about two weeks. Coincidentally, I also felt pretty poorly for those two weeks and my running performance dropped dramatically until my body adapted. The second time I started keto (after two months of break from it) I have seen nothing of the sort. Actually, I feel (but don't have good enough record to be sure) my blood sugar got a bit higher. But I have only been doing regular sugar measurements when I was in keto so I don't have data for sure.
As a type 1 I still need insulin even if I'm completely keto. It's not just carbs that affect blood glucose; as you pointed out, exercise and sleep can affect sugar among other things (stress, infections, meditation, using the toilet, drinking, various drugs...).
If my blood sugar goes up, to some degree, exercise and water can help - but they're not replacements for insulin. The suggestion that diabetics may not really need insulin is both ignorant and dangerous. You are not a doctor. People of hn, please go to your doctor for medical advice instead of hackernews comments.
I specifically, for this reason, not to mistake my (not even opinions but just thoughts) with this disclaimer:
> Given this I wonder if it is possible at least for some people with diabetes...
I am fully aware that diabetes is a dangerous, life threatening condition and that you can't do the same things that are totally fine for a healthy person.
And while I do not agree with some of the treatments for diabetes, it is just my own opinion and everybody is responsible for their own health and in doubt they should follow their health professional's advice.
Now... given the above disclaimer so that nobody confuses what I am about to write as an actual medial advice... I have just lost 1/3rd of my body weight and feeling absolutely fantastic by doing exactly the opposite to what health professionals are saying. I also observe a lot of people struggling to get any lasting effects by following the popular, official advice. I am angry and feeling powerless to the inertia of the health establishment and forces that do not really want people to get healthy but would rather avoid change that would disrupt their jobs, keep pushing medication that could be easily avoided for most of the people.
I have learned that so many "professionals" do not really understand what they are talking about. And it should not be a surprise, when you go to multiple "professionals" for advice and they give you opposite advice.
Just yesterday I had to visit an ophthalmologist to remove a foreign object from my eye (a piece of eyelash that got stuck for the past week). I had to spend at least 20 minutes to hear his ranting about how improper glasses I wear and how this is going to damage my vision. About a year ago I red (here on HN) that you can actually reduce your shortsightedness by slowly reducing the strength of your glasses which I have been doing successfully for the past year. I went from -3 diopters to -2 diopter glasses. I am currently seeing perfectly with -2.25 diopter glasses and I am using slightly lower strength for most of the day except for driving a car. Some of the stuff he said is that "This has been proven not to work by a study X", and "This is going to my shortsightedness to only deepen" (when exactly opposite has been happening) and that "If there are any result this is only my imagination" and "If I am seeing well at -2.25 it must be because my previous prescription of -3 diopters was wrong".
I am grateful that I am intelligent person that can read and make my own opinions but I am dismayed that people who can't do the same have to rely on those fucking idiots for their health.
In the US it is insanely expensive and non-easy unless you have a doctor in your thrall who can prescribe it. There's some startup doing "CGM just FYI" but it is like USD $500 per month IIRC.
Other countries, such as Australia, you can just buy them for normal capitalism prices (IIRC like USD 200$ and you own it).
Wow, and I thought they were pricy in Europe (Freestyle Fibre is €65 for a two-week monitor).
Between things like this and the price of insulin the US is really trying to kill off its diabetics. Not great when nearly half of Americans are either diabetic or pre-diabetic.
Don't necessarily disagree with your basic premise as the U.S. government is in bed with Big Pharma (and really big Everything) to actively wage economic war against its citizens...but finally there is some positive news with insulin:
https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...
I posted this to HN because I've had T1D for 30 years (since I was 8) and been a heavy tech enthusiast for nearly that amount of time. It's not often that I see those worlds collide and thought others would be interested not only in the app itself, but part of the personal story behind the developer.
To address some of the comments about the app's functionality ands why it's compelling, here's why I like it and am giving it a shot:
- I use a CGM (Dexcom G6) which reports info to HealthKit (although on a 3-hour delay, don't get me started)
- I'm an Apple Watch user who tracks both sleep and workouts
- This app provides a simple way to retroactively see what my BG was doing during both sleep and workouts. Yes, you can get this information through other solutions or by time matching against a more detailed graph, but this app provides a much easier, lightweight way to do it IMO.
- I've played with solutions like nightscout, but found them overall to be tricky to set up and maintain and don't think they are good solutions for the average person. I'll probably take another look as a weekend project since it's been a while.
- Glooko, Tidepool (which I'm familiar with) and many other apps have excellent reports, but IMO are still fairly heavyweight for what I am looking to get.
Overall, I think that this is a great start for an app and is made by a solo, indie, T1D developer who is actively soliciting feedback.
Does this study will answer the question behind the low-GI food trend, which is (as best as I understand the topic) :
"what are the impact of high, medium, low GI food on our health as non diabetic people" ?
Did they track the cohort meals ?
Very interesting! Many people with T1D wonder, when they get a sensor, what a “normal” glucose chart would look like. I’ve never seen a graph for a non diabetic person. I’ve checked the glucose of friends a time or two and it’s consistently been 85, which was good to know.
Yeah, I have some really mixed opinions about this, and it's honestly really conflicting for me. As both a type 1 and a wannabe codemonkey, I love the idea of innovation and new software ~things~ in the t1d world because it's the confluence of two very essential circles to me.
But... this just kinda rubs me the wrong way. It's discussed and presented as if it's the first/only thing in its class- admittedly it doesn't do this in any overglorified or oversensationalized way, but just... in sheer ignorance of large, giants in the field who have done far more than this project for far longer.
The literal only thing this project purports to do is provide analysis for glucose data, and only from one very proprietary source, healthkit. Clarity and Glooko have been around forever, and they're stable, corporate products. But even disregarding the 'official' stuff, NightScout's reports are insanely powerful, https://nightscout.github.io/nightscout/reports/ and have been around for ages, and it and the existence of Loopkit constitute massive existing t1d/developer communities
It's a pretty app, and probably more userfriendly than nightscout to nontechnical folk, but why not just say that if that's your selling point? Why just ignore everything and pretend like you're the only thing that exists?
It feels dishonest and impersonal- borderline corporate, except I almost guarantee any corporate project that exists solely as a stand-in replacement to an existing product would be comparing themselves to every available baseline they could. It's like there's this broad community that already exists, and this project just... pretends they don't exist? I don't get how someone who's remotely tangential to the T1D community could either overlook that, or intentionally refrain from discussion about it.
It's not really a super egregious thing, so I don't know why I seem to care so much, but the whole vibe of this 'project' just feels odd to me.
Congrats on this launch! I don't (yet) have to monitor my blood glucose but I have family who does, and I'll be sending them a link. I like how it puts a usable face on all the data squirreled away in HealthKit. I use a similar approach for weight measurements, where one (ugly, annoying, locked-in) app that came with my scale adds measurements to HealthKit, but I use Happy Scale to view and interpret the measurements.
Have you considered making an Android version of Glucomate? I haven't looked into HealthKit itself but I'm working on another app that has privacy-sensitive concerns. When considering whether to make an Android version of my app, I realize that as little as I know about building privacy-respecting apps for ios devices, Android seems like at least an order of magnitude harder.
Beyond which platform it's on, the article describes some of the developer's experiences as a long-time diabetic and which gaps he saw in the market etc so may still be interesting to people who are not iOS users, but I get what you're saying.
I love the clean design and healthkit integration, but for me it can't beat Glooko. Mainly for the integration with my T:Slim x2 insulin pump, so I can correlate what control-IQ is doing to my insulin, with my blood glucose readings from my CGM. That's super important to me to make decisions about pump settings.
Indeed, though the author is T1 and referring to a T1 cure. From the article:
> During that time, I've heard various things about a cure for type 1 diabetes. Funnily enough, it's always 5-10 years away. I won't get my hopes up, but what I do know is that over the last couple of decades, despite there not being a cure, the technology available to treat and manage the disease has improved dramatically.
I got my father-in-law to give me a freestyle sensor, which was region-locked. I ended up buying one of these[0], and it worked well to get the data into healthkit
https://www.sugarmate.io/
There are several more in this space, at least if you are using a Dexcom CGM:
https://www.dexcom.com/en-us/partnerships/health-apps.
If you are wondering about commercialization, you can get into (US, can't speak for other countries!) regulatory weeds pretty quickly, especially if your commercial plan involves informing clinicians.