The glucose sensor, made by Minimed, is not yet approved by the FDA for personal use,but for professional care usage. I had the opportunity to try it out and thought I'd share my experience with you. I previously tried it out in December and was impressed by the great graphs it comes up with after being downloaded to my doctors computers. Since it is a doctors model I can not see what my blood sugars are at the time it takes it, but rather wait until 3 days of wearing it and have it dowloaded onto a computer. So basically I'm just wearing it for the fun of it, and in hopes of having it marketed soon by being in a study with it. Though I must say, seeing what you are when you dont check, (it does 288 checks a day, now how BGMs that many times every day??) is very helpful in fine tuningy my basal rates and insulin doses. In the future Minimed hopes to combine the sensor with the pump-- I really look forward to that!!!
Now you're probably asking, what is this glucose sensor anyhow?? Well.... It is about the size of an Advantage meter, and has this wire tubing and then an infusion set, similar to a Silhouette, and is easily inserted by your doctor or nurse. It was virtually painless, I am happy to say. So it is worn all the time, including in the shower, with a lovely "shower pack" over it to prevent it from getting wet. I still had to check regularly like it was any normal day, and also program what my reading was along with events (such as insulin, feeling low, exercise, meal) into the sensor so when it graphs it will show the correlation between my meter and the sensor... pretty cool! That is about all I can think of to say about it. If anyone has any questions on it, or what I didn't include about it, please email me!!
Here is a picture of the sensor, compliments of Minimed's Webpage
here is a graph of my blood sugars on February 3rd. The squares are when I checked my blood sugar and what I was. As you see the match up with what the sensor was reading as well. The trianges are when I ate and the circles are when I did insulin.
