Insulin Pump showing blood glucose dropping with three arrows down and currently at 133 mg/dl.

Insulin Pump Predictive Alarms – Catching Lows before they happen

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I love a lot of things about my Medtronic Minimed 670G Insulin Pump, but if I had to name my number one favorite thing, it’s the predictive alarms. It warns me about lows before they happen, which means that most of the time I can correct the low before I even feel it!

Insulin pump alarm history shows Alert before low occurred.
My insulin pump keeps a history of all of the alarms. The most recent one is an “Alert before low.”

Yes, it really did notify me that my blood glucose was dropping fast enough that I may go low. I was at 133 mg/dL and dropping fast enough for the display to show three arrows down. Even though that’s quite a distance from the low threshold of 70 mg/dL, Medtronic’s predictive alarm went off because of the speed at which my blood glucose was dropping. In this case, it was from exercise! When I got this alarm, I drank a juice box and didn’t experience any hypoglycemia event! Yay!!

Insulin Pump shows a graph of my blood glucose.

Going low is really not any fun. A low blood glucose makes me feel shaky, anxious, and icky. It’s scary. It’s not good for your brain, nor your body… The scary thing about insulin is that too much of it can make you go low. It’s hard to always get the dosage “just right.”

Fortunately, my insulin pump has really amazing predictive capabilities! It automatically reads my sensor glucose level from the CGM and alerts me if my blood glucose is likely to go low in the next 20 minutes!

The single arrow down in this photo indicates that the rate has decreased, and my blood glucose is stabilizing.

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