Hi
@SueJB - I did write that in a bit of a rush and wasn’t very clear, so I’ll expand on it now I’ve got a bit of time.
Freestyle Libre is a flash glucose monitor, which means that in order to find out what your levels are, you need to “flash” it with your phone or the proprietary scanner. The sensor itself holds the last eight hours worth of numbers, so you need to scan at least that often to get all your data. It’s a passive system, so doesn’t alert you to out of range numbers at the moment.
Constant glucose monitoring (CGM) is where you have a different type of sensor, eg Dexcom, which transmits a bg level every five minutes to an app on your phone or a proprietary receiver. These have alarms, so if you go out of range, you get alerted audibly. You can also view data on a smartwatch. These systems are very expensive and you’d need some very good clinical reasons to qualify for one.
However, if you get the little transmitter we mentioned, which sits on your Libre, it turns it into a CGM. It scans the sensor every five minutes for you and Bluetooths the data to your phone (you do need a smartphone). So you can then set alarms and again, send the data to certain watches.
For example, I use the Libre with the MiaoMiao sensor, an app called Spike on my iPhone, and a Fitbit Ionic watch. During the day, I’ve turned audible alarms on my phone off, and just have vibrating alerts on my watch. I have everything on at night!
Does that explain things a little better? Happy to answer any questions you might have x