If you are one of the 422 million people suffering from diabetes, you may be on the lookout for ways to simplify your diabetes management. Since many factors such as managing your diet, exercise, medication, and stress contribute to changing blood sugar levels, we understand that keeping your blood sugar levels within a healthy range can be challenging.
Fortunately, with the use of smartphones, the internet and other communications technology, patients can keep track of their blood sugar levels and manage their chronic diseases better.
Management of diabetes requires awareness. Knowing what makes your blood sugar levels fluctuate and how to control this rise and fall with lifestyle modifications is crucial for a healthy, active life. Smartphone technology allows you to analyze, document, and monitor your health from a handheld device.
Not just Diabetes, smartphones have the potential to help patients self-manage other chronic conditions as well. Lifestyle modification is crucial in the treatment of many chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and heart diseases. With smartphone technology, patients can make use of innovative strategies to improve their self-management skills. Further, smartphones can facilitate communication between patient and provider and thereby increase patient compliance with the treatment.
We’ve listed down 4 ways you can use your smartphone to manage your diabetes:
1.Overall Diabetes Management: You can self-manage your diabetes by using apps that let you track and monitor your blood sugar levels, calculate your A1C, show trends in your self-care by letting you know when you’re doing well and what could use improvement, present graphs that show the connection between what you eat and how your blood sugar reacts to it, give alerts during abnormal readings, and help you stay on track between visits to the doctor. Enrolling yourself in a Chronic Care Management program like DrNewMed’s Un-chronic Yourself can help you use technology to bring you the best of health care.
2.Fitness Trackers: Fitness trackers help you keep accountable for your exercise/physical activity levels. They also provide visuals of your progress and help you set daily goals for yourself. Smartphones also give access to workout videos that you can follow at home. Studies indicate that using a fitness tracker consistently can increase your daily step count.
3.Daily Reminders: Keeping track of medications, including remembering when and how to take them, can be difficult especially when you’re down with many responsibilities and activities. Forgetting to take your medications as directed by your physician can have a negative impact on your blood sugar levels and can even turn life-threatening. However, using smartphones, you can use reminder apps that send users medication and refill reminders, offer drug interaction warnings, and even help caregivers and healthcare providers manage prescriptions for their patients. You can also manually add reminders and alarms on your phone without using apps to help you take medications on time so you never miss a dose.
4.Meal-planners: Planning your meals is one of the best ways to kick start your diabetes management and stay on top of your health goals. By using meal planner apps you can save time, control your portion sizes, reduce the stress of last-minute cooking and avoid unhealthy last-minute options.
We hope smartphones help you get the support you need for self-managing your chronic illnesses. And remember your smartphone is, after all, a mobile phone, you can always call a friend or your healthcare provider if self-managing your diabetes gets to you.
If you’ve been struggling with managing your illness or are looking for a proactive chronic care management plan, try DrNewMed’s Un-Chronic Yourself.
