How to Use Technology to Manage Your Diabetes
We live in a tech-obsessed world, and there is an abundance of technology out there to manage diabetes.
Combining knowledge, technology and data can help empower you to make the best decisions for your diabetes and body.
Beyond Insulin Pumps, What Diabetes Technology Helps Manage Your Diabetes?
Smart Insulin Pens
Multiple daily injections (MDIs) come in many forms—the oldest of which is the good old-fashioned syringe and vial of insulin.
For many people, however, 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 help people take the right amount of insulin at the right time to prevent 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 host of benefits to people with diabetes, and can work in tandem with a phone app, where users can:
- Track insulin on board/active 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 you don’t forget to take your insulin
- Track how much insulin you’ve already administered—and when you took it
- Help prevent people from overdosing—or overlapping —insulin doses
- Connect to fitness apps and trackers—including apps that can generate daily time in range (TiR) reports and daily insulin usage
- Track insulin temperature to prevent you from taking spoiled insulin
- Are compatible with most short- and long-acting insulins—and will even dose in half units.
Smart insulin pens available in the United States include:
- Tempo Pen & TempoSmart App (Lilly Diabetes)
- InPen & InPen App (Medtronic)
- NovoPen Echo (NovoNordisk)
- Unity Pen & Unity App (Abbott)
Continuous Glucose Monitor Data
When it comes to technology that helps manage diabetes, continuous glucose monitor (CGM) data is very powerful.
Small, externally worn CGM devices can be used instead of manual blood-sugar testing, and include:
CGMs require very little 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 automatically tests the interstitial fluid (fluid found in the spaces around cells) and approximates a blood-sugar level every one to five minutes.
CGMs also show trend lines. Once you notice patterns, you can adjust your medications to better stay on top of your management.
You can also set low- and high-blood-sugar alarms that will wake you up in the middle of the night so you treat blood-sugar levels before they become dangerously low or high.
Although frequently worn along with an insulin pump (or even in an integrated system with automatic insulin dosing), many people use CGMs along with MDI and find improvement in their blood-sugar levels.
CGM Data Apps
The data from CGMs can be overwhelming, but several apps can take your blood-sugar data and make it more digestible and easy to understand.
Two of the most popular CGM data apps are the Freestyle LibreLink App and The Dexcom Clarity App.
Freestyle LibreLink App
The Freestyle LibreLink App can automatically help you track daily and weekly patterns by generating pattern reports to help fine-tune your diabetes management even more.
A daily patterns graph can show the variability of blood-sugar levels over multiple hours and days and time in target.
Learning what your blood-sugar patterns are and how your body reacts to certain foods, stress and exercise can help you modify your daily 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 information for users of their system, including:
- TiR
- Daily blood-sugar reports and patterns, and
- Estimated glucose management indicator (GMI) that you can use to estimate your A1C.
The app can show average blood sugar levels over a two-, seven-, 14-, 30- or 90-day span.
The Dexcom Clarity App can also directly communicate with your healthcare team, so you can make meal, exercise, and medication adjustments in real time—improving your diabetes and overall health even more!
Food Apps
Learning what to eat can be a difficult challenge when you live with diabetes.
Technology, however, is here to help!
MyNetDiary
MyNetDiary is a popular app that has a searchable database with nearly a million food entries and carbohydrate counts for people to access.
If you follow a specific diet or are looking to lose or maintain weight or muscle mass, MyNetDiary can create a diet plan to meet your needs.
This can help empower you when eating meals with family or friends, having all your carbohydrate-counting needs right at your fingertips.
Snaq
Snaq helps users count carbohydrates in 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 choice to people with diabetes.
With Snaq, the user takes a picture of a snack or meal and gets nutritional information.
However, there are limitations (blurry photos, homemade foods, and secret sauces can still trip up the data).
Snaq users can add notes to a meal and graph trends. You can also view and save time-in-range data for various meals, which can help you better learn what foods and meals your body reacts to over time.
In Addition to Using Technology to Manage Your Diabetes, Stick to the Basics
In addition to all the newest technology trying to make life with diabetes a little easier, it is always important to also stick with the basics of good diabetes management.
This includes:
- Routinely taking your prescription medications
- Testing your blood-sugar levels every day
- Regularly seeing your doctor
- Eating healthy, balanced meals
- Staying hydrated with water
- Getting regular exercise and physical activity
- Practicing stress management
- Aiming for adequate sleep
- Seeking social and community support
Technology has moved diabetes management very far in recent years.
Use it to your advantage to help inspire and motivate you to take your diabetes management to the next level!
This content was made possible by Tempo, a Founding Partner of Beyond Type 2 at the time of publication.
