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Gaming Your CGM ala Pokémon GO


New concepts always seem easier to explain when you can point to something that people already understand. Take the new Pokémon GO phenomenon.

About a decade ago I developed a game for kids with type 1 diabetes and we called it MysteryBGee™. It was designed as a way to reward kids for checking blood sugar and to encourage them to share their meter data through their GlucoMON® wireless transmission device. The telemonitoring system in the cloud picked a random number each day and anyone who had a bg # that day that matched the MysteryBGee number of the day won a small prize. If there were no matches then the person whose number was closest was the winner. I wrote a post last year about this experience here.

Given my concern with how the average person uses their cgm plus the often unreliable and inaccurate nature of cgm data, I was thinking about ways to encourage people to be more engaged with their blood sugars and the tools they use to manage.

Voila! Pokémon GO for CGM.