My name is Clemma and I am writing about my experience with the Dexcom Seven continuous glucose monitoring system. I live in Minneapolis with my young son and my not so young husband. I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 11 years ago, when I was almost 21 years old. I started pumping 7 years ago, first with a Minimed 508, then an Animas IR1200, and now with the OmniPod. Friday, June 29 I hooked up to my newest constant companion, the one and only Comrade Dex...

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Dexcom Seven software: Hourly statistics graph

Hourly statistics give you a deluge of information and some cool looking boxplots. You can customize many details, and it's too confusing to summarize here. Read on.

Here is the hourly statistics window, covering all my blood sugar readings for the past 8+ days:
I don't know how clear the picture is if you click on it, but it is showing data from all days, all hours, all glucose readings. Nothing held back, nothing filtered.

As you can see, I am having some issues in the late afternoon.

This funny chart at the bottom gives lots of statistics broken down by hour of the day. The first row gives the number of 5-minute averages used to calculate the numbers for each hour. The next row gives the average glucose reading for that hour. For those of you who are into the rest of the stats, the table also gives minimum, quartiles (25, 50, 75), maximum, standard deviation, estimated standard deviation (highest and lowest 25% classified as "outliers" and removed), standard error of the mean, and percentage coefficient of variation. I'm not going into what all that means here, but I am a biostatistician, and if you ever want an explanation about a certain type of statistic, contact me and I'm happy to enlighten you.

The cool thing about the hourly statistics is that you have a lot of control over how things are categorized, and then you can display the information according to category. For instance, here are the default definitions of hypoglycemia, low blood sugar, target range, high blood sugar, and hyperglycemia:








These definitions don't quite work for me, so I can customize them to my personal goals:



The rows in blue indicate categories that I edited.




Now I can filter my graph to only show readings that are categorized as hyperglycemia:


You can see some hyperglycemia after breakfast, some after lunch, and most of it after dinner. Now I get to target my dinner boluses to reduce the highs. Maybe in a month I can use this chart to show progress.

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