New Glucose testing system

Will certainly look forward to your feedback Mark. Closest I've managed to get to one so far is in meeting someone who had just had it fitted. His reaction after a couple of days was positive. I'm seriously considering getting one when they are finally on sale in the UK. It's very interesting that Abbott are focusing all their advertising at patients rather than professionals presumably in the belief that the user demand will drive volumes up more quickly than waiting for approval from NICE. Hopefully that will cause prices to fall and we'll quickly reach the point where the price difference with strips becomes minimal. I suspect that this will mainly be driven by the next manufacturer to produce a similar system charging less than Abbott. Could we see the end of test strips in a few years? Hopefully.

All I have started a new thread to record all the details of my Abbott Libre experiment. You can find it here

Decided to post here rather than on the new thread:
I was unable to squeeze any cost information out of Abbott when I phoned them, but they did say that the sensors could be bought individually, or that it would be possible to buy a subscription, so that they came automatically every month or every 3 months. Do you have any info on that?
Thanks,
David

Hi, not as yet but I will be trying to get information and as and when I get it I will add it to the cyborg thread. As I said I have been told that the sensors currently cost £48. Generally I would expect this price to drop particularly if another company launches a similiar product to increase competition. I have no idea if this is likely as they will all keep things under wraps until they are launched.

I read somewhere that the sensor takes a reading every minute. If it did the reading every two minutes, would it last twice as long? This would make it more affordable - even for the NHS. Of course it would lower Abbott's profit margin.

Hi Alan, Firstly Abbott need to make a profit on these devices or they won't make any more, they are a business and like all the others are in it to make a profit. But getting back to the point , I'm not sure how often the device measures but the best granularity I can export is readings 15min apart. Its impossible to tell if the device records more than this and the meter and software only give access to 15min intervals. Reducing the rate that readings are taken won't make a difference I think because the limitation is the reliabilty of the sensor. This is attatched to the flesh and has a pin that sits under the skin, Abbott say the sensor is limited to 14 days because after that the readings become less reliable i.e not within the legal range that all BG measuring devices have to confirm to ( which are pretty lose anyway). I don't know if this is because the technology is new or its just not capable of working for long periods. I do know that there are other devices at the trial stage that are designed to last longer, however these have not got past the trial stage as yet so may never become available. I think the issue with all these devices is accuracy of reading long term, not the rate that they take readings at,