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Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

My son does something similar. In Vietnam, only the Freestyle Libre 1 is available, so we got the aftermarket MiaoMiao transmitter for it. The transmitter talks to an iPhone running xDripForiOS (https://github.com/JohanDegraeve/xdripswift) which, in turn, pushes the CGM data to nightscout (https://nightscout.github.io). We can then follow that data on nightscout using xdrip on our own phones.

It's been a real life changer. Before I'd have to stay up at night to check his blood a couple of times, but now I no longer need to. We've been able to flatten his curve and keep him in a sane range by adapting his basal rate based on the data. I can see when he is dropping low at school and inform them to correct the situation.

I'm not sure why the author isn't using nightscout data for his complication though. Great article, none the less.

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I HATE the Freestyle Libre. The concept of continuous glucose monitoring is life saving, but this particular product is very very bad. The hardware design is awful. I've received 9 of them and 5 have broken before their expiration date, for a variety of reasons. Two of them broke immediately at first application.

Glucose monitors in general are expensive ($100+ retail) products that are meant to be disposable every two weeks, which itself is insane. I understand the design constraints that the Libre is under, and they are onerous, but they just have to make a more reliable product.

We've found them to be pretty reliable here. They tend to lose accuracy for extreme highs and lows, but when it's within 80-250 it's pretty spot on with our blood meter.

xDrip also has a feature that will calibrate the libre with pokes which increases the accuracy.

We never bolus off the libre's readings though, but it's fantastic for trends and seeing spikes and crashes in real-time. For example, I can see that my son is high af between 8am to 11am (post breakfast spike), so I've tweaked his basal rate a few times so that he's always in range now during that time period with no crashing afterwards.

I mean, I would love a dexcom over the libre any day of the week, but I'll take what I can get here in Vietnam.

Where do you get the MiaoMiao transmitter in Vietnam? I need to get one for my dad (thanks to your comment), but my google-fu didn't work out for it.

We got ours from https://miaomiao.cool/ but it took almost 2 months to get. I'd also order extra stickers.

If you need xdrip4ios, let me know and I can put it on testflight for you.

I just ordered from http://miaomiao.cool

I've been on my Freestyle Libre for about 3 years. Over that time I've had 2 fail when applied and a couple fall off when caught or knocked.

Overall I'm impressed but there's quite a lot of waste, I'd love a reusable applicator.

Same here. They just up and die. Abbott has replaced a few for me. And I think the only way they’re going to get more reliable is if you force Abbott to cover the cost of the dead unit vs you/me.

I have a similar setup, but with the Fitbit Versa 3 connected to Nightscout (https://glancewatchface.com/).

I can imagine this being incredibly useful for parents!

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