a good meter your recommendations

[gail2]

as you know i have asked my gp if i can have a meter for myself to test Staff have one in meds room He has said noso i wonderedif peeps could recomened one thats not to expensive Onethat test strips are not expensie as well
Thanks in advance
am going to try the EB center and explain why i want one to them you never know

 

[rosalindb]

What is usually mentioned here is the GlucoNavii or Tee2

 

[gail2]

What is usually mentioned here is the GlucoNavii or Tee2

thanks for this
have looked at this forums shop and am going to buy one of those offered here
Anyone brought from the shop would u reconmend it?

 

[harbottle]

Contour Blue is far better than the gluco navii.

 

[Leadinglights]

Contour Blue is far better than the gluco navii.

I have had the predecessor of the GlucoNavii for many years with no problems but I think the strips are a similar price to the Contour Blue.

 

[Deb_l]

Contour Blue is far better than the gluco navii.

I have the Contour Blue and it's excellent. I don't know how much the test strips compare to others as I get mine on prescription but I can definitely recommend the machine itself.

 

[JJay]

I have the Contour Blue and it's excellent. I don't know how much the test strips compare to others as I get mine on prescription but I can definitely recommend the machine itself.

Test strips are very reasonable- around £8.50 excl VAT. My GP/ICB have finally woken up to that and I can now get them on prescription for the first time in 2 years!

@gail2 it might be worth checking Ascensia website as they will sometimes offer a free meter

 

[gail2]

haveordered it now +test strips very resonale price and im supporting DUK

 

[gail2]

my contour plus blue came today well packed and fast delivery am well chuffed with it good vavue for money and im helping DUK easy to use as well

 

[Ieva DUK]

Let us know how you find it @gail2 ! Hope it will help you track things better

 

[PerSpinasAdAstra]

I have had the predecessor of the GlucoNavii for many years with no problems but I think the strips are a similar price to the Contour Blue.

It's very tricky to spot problems with a single meter if there's nothing to compare it to. The basic standards that all meters have to meet leave a lot of wiggle-room for meters that can be a lot less accurate than others. I have seven meters at present and am testing each drop of blood with four meters each time I test. I'm gathering data to try to find the most consistent meter(s) that can be used to check the accuracy of CGMs at the blood glucose concentrations that are most applicable to Type 2s trying for remission. The reason I'm doing this is I'm considering creating some software that handles CGM data - it's complicated but basically a 'remission app'. To make it work I'd need some way to adjust CGM data to make it relatively consistent from day to day and from sensor to sensor, which means I'd need something to compare it to, which means a couple of good meters, ideally ones with affordable test strips. At this point I'm just trying to find out if the software tool I have in mind is even possible.

Of the seven I have the GlucoNavii almost always gives the lowest reading. At around the 8 mmol/L mark, based on a rough average of the readings from all seven meters, the Navii will typically read low by over 1 mmol/L. It also jumps around a lot - it's the most inconsistent of the seven. That's not to say it's the worst meter out there but it does not appear to be the best meter for a T2 doing the 2 hour test to figure out what they can and cannot eat. At two hours after eating many T2s are trying to stay below a certain level, and based on my amateur experiments the Navii may give a person a false impression of how good or otherwise a particular meal is for them. I don't have a Contour Blue but if it's calibrated in a similar way to the the Contour Next in this image it's probably a much better meter for this purpose. Also worth noting that older meters don't have a temperature sensor in them and so can give wildly varying results depending on the temperature of the meter and strips.

 

[Docb]

Were all those readings taken from the same drop of blood?

If I had several meters I think the test i might do would be to use each of them to do a waking reading taking blood from the same drop if I could. I would do this for a couple of weeks. I would then plot the reading from each monitor against time and eyeball the plots to see if any meter was consistently different to the others. I might also do some basic stats to see if any apparent differences had any statistical significance.

Do you fancy having a go at something like that @PerSpinasAdAstra ?

 

[PerSpinasAdAstra]

Were all those readings taken from the same drop of blood?

If I had several meters I think the test i might do would be to use each of them to do a waking reading taking blood from the same drop if I could. I would do this for a couple of weeks. I would then plot the reading from each monitor against time and eyeball the plots to see if any meter was consistently different to the others. I might also do some basic stats to see if any apparent differences had any statistical significance.

Do you fancy having a go at something like that @PerSpinasAdAstra ?

Yes they're all from the same drop of blood. What I'm doing at present is testing one drop before meals and two hours later with four meters while wearing a Libre 2. I also test when when the CGM is showing I'm around the peak of the spike after eating, if I happen to spot that levels might be at their highest. Two fingertips aren't looking very healthy right now 😉

The meters give results which are quite close to each other at low blood glucose concentrations and diverge as levels rise. I suspect the reason for that is they're all calibrated at a level somewhere below 4 mmol/L for safety purposes - the level most critical for identifying hypos and so the level at which the meter should be most accurate for safety. I've only seen all four meters give the same reading once when I tried to catch my true fasting level before foot to floor/dawn phenomenon took effect (image below). As BG levels rise the meters diverge from each in a consistent way - I can lay out the meters on the table in the likely order of the readings they're going to give me before I even prick my finger - second image below is an example - four tests with four meters. After the first tests I laid the meters out in the order I expected and it worked. I have the clocks on all the meters set to the same time and am exporting the data via CSV files. I don't know enough about statistics yet to know how I'm going to analyse the data though I will be able to write the software that matches the readings with the same timestamp to identify readings that were from the same drop of blood. There are some independent studies on meter accuracy I can look to in order to help figure out which meters are likely to be the most accurate and use those to compare all the other meters to but it's proving to be a very complex problem.

 

[harbottle]

Of the seven I have the GlucoNavii almost always gives the lowest reading. At around the 8 mmol/L mark, based on a rough average of the readings from all seven meters, the Navii will typically read low by over 1 mmol/L. It also jumps around a lot - it's the most inconsistent of the seven.

That was my experience with the GlucoNavii. I only got one because it was mentioned here as having cheap strips, and I have 'TruMetrix' one that had expensive strips. I didn't use it for long and stuck with the TruMetrix.

 

[helli]

Why do you need such accuracy?
The way I see it is there are so many things that affect our BG that one approximation on top of other approximations has never been worth it.
With 42 things that can affect BG and carb counts in food being approximate, how do you know if the reason your change in BG 2 hours after eating is higher this time than the last time you ate the same meal is due to stress, illness, exercise, weather, lack of sleep, the meal not being exactly the same or your meter being inaccurate?
This is why we look for trends rather than getting hung up on individual readings.

As someone taking insulin, I need a good enough idea of my current BG in order to calculate my insulin dose. But it will rarely be exactly the right amount of insulin because of those 42 things that affect BG (when I dose my insulin, I do not know if the next meeting will be more or less stressful or whether I will need to run for the bus or …) or whether the slice of cake will have more currants than usual or how much I will have to round up or round down my dose.

 

[PerSpinasAdAstra]

Why do you need such accuracy?
The way I see it is there are so many things that affect our BG that one approximation on top of other approximations has never been worth it.
With 42 things that can affect BG and carb counts in food being approximate, how do you know if the reason your change in BG 2 hours after eating is higher this time than the last time you ate the same meal is due to stress, illness, exercise, weather, lack of sleep, the meal not being exactly the same or your meter being inaccurate?
This is why we look for trends rather than getting hung up on individual readings.

As someone taking insulin, I need a good enough idea of my current BG in order to calculate my insulin dose. But it will rarely be exactly the right amount of insulin because of those 42 things that affect BG (when I dose my insulin, I do not know if the next meeting will be more or less stressful or whether I will need to run for the bus or …) or whether the slice of cake will have more currants than usual or how much I will have to round up or round down my dose.

I'm looking for the accuracy to see if it might be possible for a person to quickly learn about those 42 things. At present it takes a very long time to learn about these things and most never do.

Stress - can be detected via changes in Heart Rate Variability - measured by several wearable devices.
Illness - people know when they're sick and could log it in an app.
Exercise and lack of sleep - A Fitbit and several other devices generate data on those.
Weather...
Meal data can be gathered with a food tracking app like Cronometer or MyFitnessPal.

For a Type 1 insulin is the treatment and everything else is a variable. For a Type 2 food, exercise, weight loss and medications are the treatments and everything else is a variable, many of which can be quantified though of course not all.

I'm trying to figure out if it might be possible to create software to help a person learn about the effects of their treatments and the uncontrollable variables in the space of a few months rather than over the course of many years. To do that such a system would need consistent data, and that requires a reasonably accurate meter or two. Gotta start somewhere.

 

[Docb]

@PerSpinasAdAstra - would you be happy to share your data? Perhaps attach your csv files to a post? I would be interested to look at it.

@helli I am not sure anybody is looking for "accuracy". More looking for consistency which can then be used to figure out if there are any valuable signals amongst a lot of apparently random noise. My instinct is that it is a lost cause but I chased many of them in the past.

 

[helli]

Illness - people know when they're sick and could log it in an app

It is often mentioned that upcoming illness can affect BG before the person experiences any other symptoms. In other words, in hindsight it is realised that BG has been running high for the last days before a cold starts.

And, don't forget the issues that I did not mention which can be variable such as hormones and vaccines.

 

[PerSpinasAdAstra]

@Docb - Certainly happy to share the data yes though I can't post it on the public forum just yet. Some of the exports contain personal information. For example the Contour app enables a person to tag a reading with their current location. I experimented with the app early on to see what the CSV file looks like and so that file currently contains my home address. I don't want to go through all the files and scrub them just yet. If you could perhaps send me an email address via direct message though I could put all the data I have so far in a zip file and send it this evening? I could also send the photos I've been taking in recent days which include the thermometer readings. I'm still not sure how much of a difference temperature makes though I suspect it might be significant, perhaps for some meters more than others.

@helli - Re. illness that certainly appears to be the case. Interestingly a couple of weeks ago I pulled a muscle in my back in a minor way and didn't rest it enough. The pain spread across my back in the following days, presumably due to inflammation. At around the same time my BG readings seemed unusually high, my fasting levels were very much higher than usual. The pain wasn't severe, just uncomfortable but I decided to get some ibuprofen to see what happened. Within two hours of starting the ibuprofen my fasting levels came back down to normal. Just one example of a host of variables that may or may not mean what I think they mean. Interestingly users of Fitbit and Garmin fitness trackers report seeing illness coming before it actually happens due to observed changes in resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV). Reduced heart rate variability is also associated with stress. Stress is associated with cortisol. Might raised BG levels and reduced heart rate variability leading up to a bout of illness correlate with one another? How about the affect of weather - I've seen myself what happens when I stand out in cold weather. Is that also due to cortisol and if so, will that affect heart rate variability? How many of the known variables when it come to elevated BG levels are all just different triggers for cortisol secretion? These are the kinds of questions I might like to explore in future so I ordered a Garmin Venu 2S a couple of days ago in the Black Friday sales. That model is one of the cheapest available that tracks HRV over the course of the day and perhaps the data it generates will be interesting. Probably not, but you never know. For right now what I'd like to do it to make CGM data consistent over time so that I can compare like-for-like. With the data I already have from logging meals and from my Fitbit this should enable me to answer questions like how much exercise after a given meal is enough to keep BG levels down. A year since diagnosis and I still don't have a clear idea how much exercise is adequate, how much is worthwhile and how much is overkill. That was one of the the questions I set out to answer months ago when I first observed the effect of exercise after eating on the CGM graph and I found it a surprisingly difficult question to answer. I'd have to wear a CGM all the time for very many months to try to figure that out. I can't afford to ear CGMs all the time for years as I try to learn more which got me thinking about how a person might be able to learn as much as possible in the shortest possible time. Consistent CGM data would be very helpful. Not objectively accurate, that would be close to impossible and it doesn't need to be that, just consistent enough to see the difference between a 30 minute walk vs a 45 minute walk vs a 60 minute walk, on average, after specific meals where I have a rough idea of the amount of carbs in that meal. If I can do that then all the other variables might be easier to observe. Maybe. If nothing else the problem is keeping me entertained 😉

 

[Docb]

@PerSpinasAdAstra - check your mailbox