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Medicine Google Technology

Fitbit App Now Tracks Your Blood Sugar Levels (androidauthority.com) 22

Newly Google-owned Fitbit has introduced blood sugar tracking to its mobile app, helping you manage diabetes or any other health issue related to your glucose levels. Android Authority reports: The feature isn't available from Fitbit's current wearables, unfortunately. You'll have to either import or manually log blood sugar data in the Fitbit app yourself. When you do, though, you can set custom target ranges and check trends both throughout the day and over the long run. You can see if a change in diet is having an effect, for instance. Standard blood sugar tracking is free, although Fitbit Premium subscribers will "gradually" get the option to track levels over 30-day periods, with correlations and trends. Members will also get to share their levels through Health Coaching and the Wellness Report.
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Fitbit App Now Tracks Your Blood Sugar Levels

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  • by haus ( 129916 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @06:36PM (#61042024) Journal

    Is this intended to foreshadow blood glucose monitoring for soon to be released Fitbits or is this a response to the rumors that this feature may be in the next generation of Apple Watches?

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      WOW, a stupid dangerous thing to do, if you care about how high you health insurance us. Those with high sugar, will have that info sold, and their health insurance premiums will skyrocket.

  • blood whatever without tracking the individual.
    Or is this super invasive tracking level 2 internal ;)
  • by Lab Rat Jason ( 2495638 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @06:49PM (#61042062)

    Notepad and excel have both had this feature for a while. Why is this even news?

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      Yep, pretty dumb.

      It's as if the Apple Watch rumors caused FitBit execs to say "we must compete or you're fired" and forced their engineering team to add a manual numeric entry as a 'feature' to compete..

      FitBit execs are happy, because they can have a powerpoinnt deck that puts a check next to 'blood sugar level tracking' for both their product and Apples. Competition met!

  • by edi_guy ( 2225738 ) on Monday February 08, 2021 @06:52PM (#61042070)

    "You'll have to either import or manually log blood sugar data in the Fitbit app yourself." So data entry into your watch. Fun.

    I don't understand the point of this unless you are super invested in your Fit Bit over and beyond your actual glucose monitoring system.

    I thought that Fitbit might be going full Dexcom https://www.dexcom.com/g6/how-... [dexcom.com] with an implanted device.

    • "You'll have to either import or manually log blood sugar data in the Fitbit app yourself." So data entry into your watch. Fun.

      I don't understand the point of this unless you are super invested in your Fit Bit over and beyond your actual glucose monitoring system.

      Exactly. What's the point of this, and why the hell would I want to waste my time manually entering my data?

    • Haha indeed. I dont understand that not anybody of fitbit's PR team is saying: "wait, what exactly you want me to make a worldwide press release for?"
  • Why would I want to pay Google to take my personal medical information from me?

    I'll bet Advertisers now have 'Diabetic' as an ad targeting category too.

    • Why would I want to pay Google to take my personal medical information from me?

      Google's leadership is a great believer in PT Barnum's old maxim 'There's a sucker born every minute'. And the success of companies like Facebook - or many Google properties, for that matter - provide ample supporting evidence that the maxim is true.

      • And anything they collect is not covered under HIPPA, its Google's to keep and do with as they wish.

  • I've been using a spreadsheet to do this for years. Not sure how an 'app' could make it better. I can already analyze data and make colorful graphs and share them with anyone who is interested (and they don't need a special app either). I do it on a real computer so I have the benefit of a full keyboard, a 27" viewing screen and convenient data backups to various drives that are not controlled by data marketers. Of course that prevents entering data while I'm at the beach or plowing the south forty, but the

    • I've been using a spreadsheet to do this for years.

      Same here, going back almost nineteen years, since I was first diagnosed. And, I have a notepad type app on my phone that I can use to record readings when I'm away from home so that I don't have to check the readings on my meter to get them recorded.
  • Quite a big deal, they have added a row to their database.

  • As it stands, most of the displays for Dexcom data on Android watches are either third party (xDrip) or hacks (WearableWidgets + Nightwatch). xDrip works reasonably well if you're the T1D...if you're following the T1D (as I and my wife do ours), not so much...I use the WearableWidgets + Nightwatch hack, which stops working every so often.

    If I can bridge Dexcom's Share API to FitBit's data so "manual" becomes a script that pulls data from Dexcom Share and pushes it to FitBit, and they have apps that support

  • "You'll have to either import or manually log blood sugar data in the Fitbit app yourself."

    So the App tries to emulate a piece of paper and a pen, revolutionary.

  • So, given you manually enter the data, substitute anything for 'blood sugar' into the above... Fitbit has introduced stool colour tracking to its mobile app, Fitbit has introduced unicorn quantity tracking to its mobile app, Fitbit has introduced toenail length tracking to its mobile app. It sounds like they are trying to get some kind of jump on Apple's announcement of blood glucose monitoring on Apple Watch. As a Type-1 Diabetic myself there's no way I'd trust that to something which doesn't have some
  • It's only a feature to manually enter the level of your blood sugar. But again, Google is likely to begin showing ads for the high sugar level food, in case your blood sugar level is low. A good research topic on domyhomeworkonline.net [domyhomeworkonline.net] for Health courses: apps for tracking blood sugar levels.

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