| HN Mirror

I didn't look at the competition. I knew the Dexcom brand because my friends have had good experiences with the G series, so the Stelo was an easy impulse purchase. I'm neither diabetic nor prediabetic, so I'm not a good representative of those audiences.

For someone glucose-curious like me, the Stelo is just right. The app provides a slightly laggy real-time graph of measurements (collected every 5 minutes and reported every 15 minutes). It uses some heuristics to identify rising/falling events, and it'll notify you for the steeper cases (but I'm not sure about hypoglycemic event notifications, as I had a couple of those while sleeping and found out only when I woke up). On Android, it uses the Health Connect hub to sync some health data with other apps. It provides a rudimentary event-log function to add meal, exercise, and FYI notations. You'll also get a daily time-in-range wrap-up.

The more interesting analytics are in clarity.dexcom.com, which is a website that visualizes data that the app is constantly pushing, with a couple-hour lag. There you will find more graphs, tables that group measurements by day and hour, and various expected calculations (average, standard deviation, CV, calculated GMI). And you'll also find the all-important export to CSV button, which gives you all the sensor data. Using that I was able to import everything to Google Sheets, where I did a linear regression with finger-prick measurements to ascertain the sensor's (mild) deviation.

The Stelo feature set is clearly designed to provide all the data eventually, but not quickly enough to be useful for diabetics who need real-time info for glucose management. That's how they'll continue segmenting the Stelo and G7 audiences. I have no problem with that; if OTC GCM cost continues to drop, and they become as prevalent as annual lipid/metabolic labs, I could see the incidence of lifestyle-attributable T2D dropping, which would obviously have massive benefits to society.