 Hey there, my name is Joe and I'm a product reviewer here at AlexFergus.com and in this video we're going to have a look at the very system for continuous glucose monitoring which I'll abbreviate as CGM going forward because that's a heck of a lot easier to say. So when it comes to these CGM type systems, there's really two parts to it. You've got the hardware which we're going to discuss here in the first part of the video and then you've got the software or the app which is all taken care of on a smartphone. So before we jump into the actual components of the system, let's take a second to talk about what is continuous glucose monitoring. The whole premise behind the DEA is you apply a medical device to the back of your arm that is consistently and constantly taking readings of your circulating glucose levels. And then because of technology like this, we can keep an eye on how those glucose numbers are responding to various things like food and exercise and other types of lifestyle impacts. So it's a pretty slick system. It's really neat for monitoring this type of data, especially if you're into knowing what your glucose levels are doing throughout the course of the day and night. So let's go ahead and jump in and have a look at the hardware before we take a look at the software. Pretty simple and straightforward. The box shows up here, just a plain old cardboard box. And inside there, we've got a couple pieces of information, essentially here's your welcome card. Thank you for buying the system. And then secondly, your directions on how to install the app onto a smartphone. So pretty straightforward stuff there. The most important part of this hardware is actually the freestyle Libre Continuous Glucose monitors. And there's two parts to these. Typically there are two of these in each box, so they provide you essentially 28 days worth of monitoring. Each one of these will monitor for 14 days before it runs out of gas. Inside these monitor systems, there are essentially two components here. You've got the actual monitor that will stick on your arm inside this case here. And then this is the applicator system. Don't be scared. It's not too bad. You plug this in right here. You stick this on the back of your arm. It's essentially a painless process. And then that will remain self adhered to the system for as long as it is with you there. So pretty straightforward, very simple hardware involved with this Continuous Glucose monitoring thing. You get a couple monitors, some introductory information, and that is the extent of the hardware. So having to look at that, let's jump into the app itself and have a look at what the very app can do for your CGM systems. Okay, here we are inside the very app. And there's a few things here that we got to pay attention to that can lead you down different paths and navigation. It provides really interesting information. So the very system has set theirs up where it defaults anyway, that's much like a social media feed. So when you open up the app, it automatically defaults to what they call the timeline. You can see in the bottom left-hand corner there, that's where you navigate to that. That's where the app opens up into. And so this timeline essentially, it scrolls just like a social media feed where as you scroll up, you go backwards in time, which is then given you a summary of each of the days, various types of events that were recorded, or if you manly put in information about meals or exercise or other activities, you can see them show up in this feed. So it's a pretty busy looking feed, but there's an awful lot of interesting information in there. For example, here's a day where I went and did some sprints, calculated 14 minutes for the sprint time, the average glucose level in there. And here's how your glucose responded based on that particular activity type. Here's another event. This would have been a eating breakfast. Here's some omelette and bacon. It's got the timestamp there. It also has a score that is given by the app to whether or not that particular food significantly impacts glucose levels, where 10 means very little impact on glucose. Obviously a lower number would be a much more significant impact on glucose spikes. A lot of interesting information captured once you've got one of these meal things created in the way that the app goes about evaluating that. You have a nice range on a bar graph depiction of glucose levels, and then also various other aspects on how they will apply certain metrics to that. For example, it is using a meal timing to determine whether or not that had an effect on glucose. Likewise, it can pull in sleep data from Apple Sleep in order to determine the sleep effects on this as well. So they've done a really nice job of putting in a lot of different other types of metrics to help interpret the way glucose responds as a result of things like meals and exercise events. So that's the timeline feed. And you can see also sprinkled in these timeline feeds is information, educational information that they'll just randomly plop in there. I'm not sure what the rhyme or reason is on how they plop in these different educational aspects of it, but it's nice to as a way to keep reminding that there's a incredible library of information you can use to better understand the effects of life choices and such on glucose monitoring. So that's a quick overview of the timeline feed. Let's then move to the next feature on the app itself. You can see there's like a home screen button there right next to the timeline button. That button when you push that is actually how the app goes about extracting data from the continuous glucose monitor. I tell you what, I really like this button. This button has an incredible tactile feel to it. So when I did have a sensor on and I wanted to pull data into the app, you push and hold that button. It gives you a very robust tactile experience. It makes that button fun to push. So kudos to the very team for making that experience as satisfying as it can possibly be. OK, so that's the button to pull data in. Let's then scoot over to the dashboard feature. And I like this feature as well because this is a great way to explore your data more represented on a time continuum. And what jumps right off the page here immediately or the screen is you got your glucose levels over the previous time frame with each value they're showing up, jumps right out and grabs you in the face. So you know exactly what your glucose levels look like at specific time intervals. They do a nice Java color matching that where anything outside of their range shows up as red, conceivably not good. Whereas glucose values inside of their range shows up as green. Tonya, things are going well. So a little bit about the ranges there. The ranges that you see, the high and the low, those are established by the app itself. You can't go in and modify those at least as of yet. They establish those ranges based on how your system calibrates to that. One of the things that I took a little bit of issue with is you can't go in there and ultimately set those four numbers that you want. The system is going to do that for you. So hopefully in a future update, they'll allow you to go in and modify those as you see fit. Another feature of the dashboard screen is, of course, you can scroll your way back in time quickly and easily to get to certain points on the calendar. What I like about that is for each date, it automatically shows you at the top what your score for the day was. This would be a number that they placed based on how your glucose responded based on your choices that particular day. So it gives you a real quick and easy snapshot of how well you performed each day on the particular calendar. If we go towards the bottom of the screen, some information also jumps off the page. I think it's useful. They're showing your average glucose value and the amount of time you spent in that range. These are useful metrics as you're trying to determine what type of response you're having to various foods or activities. You can see the variability score in there as well and the number of spikes you had for that particular day. All of this is really quite handy if you wanna get into the weeds. And then, of course, you can go and add a note in there for each day based on certain things that may have happened that could have influenced glucose levels. So I really like the way they allow you to customize that aspect of it. If we turn our attention then to the top left hand corner, there's a button there called trends. The trends is yet even more information that you can extract to see how things are going on a relative basis over certain time intervals. And so if we click over to the seven day trend there, you can see they show you on a graph and they apply various types of measurements to how things have transpired over that time interval. What I like there as well is this thing called metabolic flow. Metabolic flow is essentially a relative score they give. So how you're doing in that particular time interval relative to other time intervals there. So really nice job on the analytics piece on how they've gone about in applying various metrics to the essentially the flow of your glucose as it takes place over time. Overall I was really pleased with my experience in the berry. I think it's got a nice user interface to it pretty easy to navigate. Like I said, the button tactile function there was fantastic. You can take as much as you want out of this or as little as you like just because of the way they presented the data there. So I think they've done a great job in how they have assembled the construction of this app. One more thing I wanna make point of here is that after I went through a few weeks of using the app I was proactively reached out by their development team and scheduled a time to speak with one of their developers on my experience with the app. So I will say these folks are absolutely committed to delivering a top notch user experience. They took the time 20 minutes to sit down and really go into the weeds on how I felt about the app itself. So kudos to the team there for doing a great job of staying on top of what your users really do value about the app itself. So overall, very satisfied with the experience with the very app. If you're someone who wants to dabble into the continuous Google Coast monitoring experience I think this is a great way to extract as much information out of it and very highly recommend the use of this service. So with that, thanks for watching. Take care. We'll see you next time.