It was an exciting day during my first year of fellowship when the nurse educator from a company called Dexcom came to give us all glucose monitors to try wearing for a week or so. It was a time before wearables were ubiquitous. If you were a fitness fanatic, you might have a Garmin watch or a heartrate monitor that you strapped on before workouts. But the general population hadn’t yet started tracking every heartbeat and REM cycle. Wearing a glucose monitor was a novelty.
The goal of the exercise was for endocrinologists in training to better understand the experience of patients with diabetes. And ever since that day I have tried out every new glucose monitor that has come on the market to gain firsthand knowledge of the user’s experience.
That first experience was challenging. Glucose monitors needed to be calibrated with a blood sugar from a fingerstick at least every 12 hours and also when blood sugars were reading low. I was pregnant at the time, which caused my blood sugars to be lower than in someone who isn’t pregnant. That meant the alarm was constantly going off, telling me my blood sugars were dangerously low and that I needed to calibrate the monitor yet again. I quickly became obsessed with checking my blood sugar readings. I didn’t last a week.
In the intervening years, the market for wearables has exploded. From Apple Watches to Oura rings to continuous glucose monitors, it seems like everyone is using wearables. But what does the data say about them? Are they helping or hurting us?
What are wearables?
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.