Wearables have been a tremendous thing for type 1 diabetics. They’re expensive without health insurance and have a lifespan of only 2 weeks.
As a T1D, the pancreas is defective and does not produce insulin; you have to inject it. The question is: how much insulin do I need?
The traditional solution is to puncture your finger tops with a blade, squeeze a drop of blood on a test strip, put the test strip into a small device, and the device reports your blood sugar. That’s a lot of gear to carry around all the time and your fingertips get worn badly after 3-4 tests everyday over the years. 30 years in my case.
The wearable solution is to attach a device to your tricep area that pairs with an app on your phone. I can open the app and get my blood sugar at any time. It can send me alerts if I’m at risk of low blood sugar. It can show me day over day trends using graphs and charts. I discovered I have a thing called the “dawn effect” when my blood sugar is normal overnight and starts rising when it’s morning even though I haven’t eaten anything.
A manual test 3-4 times a day simply can’t do any of this.
There are drawbacks: it’s expensive if your health insurance doesn’t cover it, the device has a lifespan of only two weeks, the adhesive makes my arm break out in a rash so I spray some allergy spray on the skin before adhering the device, it’s too easy to bump off doing normal stuff.