How Smartphones Can Help Diabetic Seniors

How Smartphones Can Help Diabetic Seniors

When you are dealing with diabetic seniors, it is especially important to identify changes in their health as early as possible, when treatment may be more effective.  Recent studies have shown that the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes worsens with age, and if symptoms aren’t monitored property it can lead to more serious complications.

Scheduling regular doctor visits is the best preventative care, but in addition to this, seniors can also play an active role in tracking important health stats on their handheld devices by downloading these helpful smartphone apps.

“According to the latest research, 54% of seniors who participated in one study said using smartphone apps to manage their diabetes was helpful, and 48% were willing to try these apps, but only 7% were actually doing so.”

How to Utilize a Smartphone for Diabetic Management

By taking advantage of apps that offer glucose tracking, nutrition guides, and medication reminders, detecting changes in a senior’s diabetic condition that need to be brought to the attention of physicians and other health care professionals is easier than ever before.

Alarms Can Be Used as Medication Reminders

Every smartphone comes with standard alarm features, including the ability to set multiple alarms and to customize them by the day of the week. While these alarms are typically used as wake-up calls, they can also be used to easily and conveniently remind the elderly to take their medication. This feature is especially helpful because medication schedules can often be complex, making them especially difficult for seniors to remember.

Alarms can also be used as reminders to eat or to monitor blood sugar levels. By programming this data into their alarms, seniors’ phones will have the responsibility of remembering these tasks covered for them.

Maintaining a Healthy Diet

Diet apps can play an important role in helping seniors to manage their diabetes. One helpful app is My Fitness Pal, which can be used to make smart nutrition choices by scanning bar codes on everyday food items, which the app will then analyze, making this the perfect companion to take along to the grocery store.

Another app that should be downloaded is Fooducate, which offers a recipe calculator that allows seniors to check calories when they are preparing meals at home. In addition to this it also has an exercise-tracking feature that can be synced with other fitness apps. Diabetes Logbook is an app that uses easy-to-read, color-coded screens to offer suggestions for healthy eating choices. But the app also provides more.

Tracking Your Glucose

Diabetes Logbook can also be used to track glucose, and there are several other apps that are also available for this task. Glooko can access data from insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors that can help seniors with their carb, insulin, and medications by analyzing them alongside their blood glucose levels.

The mySugr diabetes logbook was designed to help people with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes by offering fun challenges to complete and motivational feedback while tracking and securely backing up important data. The Glucose Buddy app offers push reminders and fast log entry that will allow seniors to compare their data with the data of other users, and they have over 36 million logs to date.

Users of Glooko alone have shown significant decreases in the risk of hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia, along with an impressive 29% increase in blood sugar testing.

According to the latest research, 54% of seniors who participated in one study said using smartphone apps to manage their diabetes was helpful, and 48% were willing to try these apps, but only 7% were actually doing so.

Rates of diabetes and of smartphone usage in this demographic are on the rise, and these figures demonstrate that the elderly can benefit from being encouraged to use these apps to improve their overall health along with their quality of living.

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