My son is Type 1 diabetic and developed it at 14. We had a year on at least 4 x daily injections and numerous finger pricks.
After a year he moved to an insulin pump, a tiny device that delivers insulin, and is controlled via a Bluetooth blood testing meter – 12 injections over 3 days down to 1 cannula change.
Move on another year and a device called an Abbott Libre hits the market – it’s a small sensor (£2 size) that you put on your arm. You can scan the sensor with NFC on your phone, and it tells you your blood sugars as it records them every 5 minutes. On top of this, it sends data to my phone, so I can see his bloods anywhere in the world. It also sends his readings to the hospital’s database – this is all automatic. This costs us 100 per month for 2 sensors which last two weeks.
Recently he’s been getting lazy either blood testing or scanning, so we’ve ordered another device which sits on top of the libre and sends data straight to his phone and will alarm if he is going too high or low – this is without scanning. The app will also send all the data to a secure web page that we can see anywhere in the world.
Blooming amazing. Was a great relief when he was using it whilst skiing with school in Austria last year, and we could see he was checking his bloods.
This has all moved on in just 2 years, from stabbing himself loads, to hugely reducing this and being able to keep tabs on his blood sugars in real time.
It’s still shit being a Type 1 though. Anything to make life easier.