*Screenshot from http://www.apple.com/watch/

What’s so great about the Apple Watch?

 

How you answer that question will depend on where you sit on this curve.

We’re excited less about what the watch can do today as where it and the Pebble watches are taking us. And how they will enable us to think differently about diabetes management.

We grabbed the watch so our Apple developer Jackie can get to work building the input dial for mumoActive. To make it just a little bit easier to track your sugars.

I use five features on the Apple Watch

1. The watch.

 

 

 

 

2. Slack and messaging notifications (our company uses no email internally). I can use voice to reply. Any more extensive replies and I pull out the phone.

 

 

 

3. View Twitter notifications. It was through my Watch that I learned about tragic the earthquake in Nepal this weekend. (Six ways to give to Nepal Earthquake relief.)

 

 

 

 

4. Control my music without pulling out my phone.

 

 

 

These features are nifty gadgets, at best, TODAY. You don’t need to have them because you can just pull out your phone as needed.

But what they do is point to an ecosystem where all my communications and useful digital tools become increasingly integrated in my life.

When I can message my wife with Siri without pulling out the phone, it’s a step closer to my communications world becoming that much more intertwined with my world when I’m walking on the street.

And this matters for diabetes management.

The easier we make it to keep track of information and communicate with our support networks, the closer we come to making diabetes management just something we do in our everyday lives. We reduce the burden. And although the annoyance of having manually to manage sugars doesn’t go away, we make it easier to do it as a habit.

5. The fifth feature is the most exciting opportunity for me:

We’re building sugar, carb and insulin input interface for the watch.

This is where it gets exciting for us. We built mumoActive because we wanted to track our two sons’ blood sugars better. Now our crack Apple developer Jackie is going to work on getting the mumoActive watch interface ready before we head up to Leeds for the People-driven Digital & Wellbeing unConference #PdDigital15.

People manage better when they know better what their blood sugars are doing. @everydayupsdwns tweeted that he looked at his sugar levels 30-40 times in a day with the Abbott Libre. And Sacha blogged about looking at his Dexcom 20 times a day. When we have tools to get our sugar information and we can use it to make fast decisions about diabetes, we are empowered to have to more control.

Those who don’t want to be early adopters to the Pebble or Apple Watch can use our fast, free app on Apple – or any other app they prefer. But we’re working to get an easy input into the app and then will start looking at using Siri to make it even easier.

 

As a gadget, the watch is pretty amazing. But as a tool that people will be able to use to integrate diabetes management into their everyday lives, it is an even more exciting development.

Get mumoActive free on the Apple Store.