It is common for most of you to be confused while choosing a glucometer. Technical jargon, features you don’t know what to do with, and numerous brands tend to make your choice difficult. Here’s all you need to know to choose the right glucometer for diabetes treatment at home.
Why self-monitoring and a glucometer?
Diabetes treatment is not just avoiding sweets and sugar, and taking medications. All those sugar-less teas and coffees you had may not be enough to stay healthy!
What is the best way to treat diabetes?
Diabetes treatment is multifold and taking medications is one single important aspect. Others include:
- Regular health checks
- Screening for diabetes complications
- Diet modification.
- Lifestyle modification
- Self-monitoring of blood glucose levels
As you can see, most of it is diabetes treatment at home – home health care. The most vital aspect of diabetes treatment at home is self-monitoring of blood glucose levels. If you monitor sugar level fluctuations at home, you are armed with crucial data that helps your diabetes doctor or endocrinologist provide exact treatment.
Information you get from self-monitoring:
- Do you have high fasting sugar levels?
- Do you have high postprandial sugar levels?
- Do you have low sugar levels while fasting?
- What is your sugar level at 3:00 AM?
All this is possible with using a glucometer for diabetes monitoring at home.
What is a glucometer?
It is a handy medical device that is used to measure your blood sugar levels. It is a vital tool to control diabetes at home. It contains a lancing device to prick for blood, glucometer test strips on which blood drop is placed, and an electronic device that determines the sugar levels.
Choosing the Best Glucometer
Here are a few things to consider for selecting the right glucometer:
Accuracy
This is the first thing you need to check in a glucometer. All glucometers have a range within which they deviate from the lab values. This deviation is due to many factors. One important factor is that glucometers use capillary blood and the lab uses venous blood. Another factor is the calibration of the glucometer.
An accepted deviation for any glucometer is 15% plus or minus of lab results done in a time gap of 30 minutes (95% of times you take the test).
To know more about the accuracy of a glucometer and its calibration, reach our expert diabetes support team. Enquire Now.
Ease of usage
Using the lancing device for pricking and viewing your results without much difficulty is very important while using a glucometer. The ease of using glucometer lancet is an important factor to consider along with ease of usage in calibration and viewing results.
Some glucometers come with ‘No Coding’ technology, which do not require any calibration. You may prefer to choose ‘No Coding’ glucometers to avoid errors because of incorrect calibration. This is particularly useful for patients with either poor vision or have poor manual dexterity.
Availability of spares (glucometer strips, lancing devices, batteries)
This is important for long term diabetes treatment at home as using test strips of a different make on a particular glucometer can give wrong values. Moreover, check for a glucometer that has a long battery life. If the battery is running low, readings might be incorrect.
Multiple sampling & quick time to give readings
It’s not like you are going to use your fingertips for the test site all the time. You might have to draw droplets of blood from the forearm, upper arm, and other areas to measure sugar levels.
The glucometer you use should be efficient and quick enough to provide the readings with minimum button pressing, and using the lancing device only once. A time of 20 seconds for providing the readings is a standard.
Storage of values
Gone are the days of maintaining log books with a history of your blood sugar levels. Choose glucometers that have memory facility. Some advanced glucometers even provide electronic medical records where you can store your sugar levels, and get reports on the trends. Some even provide an estimated HbA1c reading. Such tech-enabled features provide the edge to control diabetes at home.
Additional features
Your blood sugar readings are not just numbers. There is a need to interpret them and create intelligence out of these numbers. That’s why glucometers these days come with a load of additional features that help your diabetes treatment at home.
Some additional features offered in glucometers
- Large display and audio alerts for visually impaired
- Minimal usage of buttons
- Illuminated screens
- Glucometers compatible with insulin pumps
- Smartphone mobile app connected glucometers
Apollo Sugar Doctor connected glucometer
It is one thing to have a feature-loaded glucometer. It’s an entirely different ball game having a doctor connected glucometer. Taking diabetes treatment at home to the next level, Apollo Sugar Glucome glucometer is not just an instrument, it is an entire diabetes care team in your pocket.
What you can do with an Apollo Sugar Glucome glucometer
- Measure blood sugar levels and share it with your diabetes doctor
- Video consult diabetes doctors and endocrinologists of Apollo Sugar
- Video chat with diabetes educators and dieticians
- 24/7 assistance via Apollo Sugar app
- Customized diet plan
- Diabetes footwear and diabetes socks
Take your diabetes treatment at home beyond numbers. Enquire Now.
