What is Glycemic Index? Glycemic Index is just one tool to add to your arsenal to help you manage your diabetes. GI assigns carbohydrate foods a score, according to how much it increases blood sugar levels. Foods are classified as having low (0-55), medium (56-69) or high (70-100) GI.
If you’re wondering how to lower your blood sugar levels, it’s easy to see why a knowledge of the glycemic index is helpful.
Blood Sugar Metrics Your blood glucose levels will naturally go through highs and lows throughout the day - these variations depend a lot on when and what you eat, but there’s a bunch of other factors that affect blood sugar levels. More on that in a bit.
Here’s what you need to know right now: checking your blood sugar isn’t as simple as checking your weight, although it’s equally as helpful in understanding your health.
What’s Time-in-Range? And Why’s It So Important? Let’s cover the basics first. Time-in-Range is a diabetes management metric, which indicates the percentage of time per day a person’s glucose level is in a target range. Ideally, people with diabetes should spend as much Time-in-Range as possible.
Now, this target range is different for everyone, and you should speak to your doctor to determine your ideal range. Factors that affect your range include diabetes type, food you have access to, and the amount of exercise you can commit to.
Research & Development (R&D) Not all apps contain a tech component requiring R&D. But if the product does, it brings certain challenges. The complexity of problems requiring R&D to find solutions will make these activities difficult to plan. The relationship between input (time and other resources) and outcome (e.g. working solution) is not linear. A problem that occurs can be solved within days or within months or, in the worst case, never.
For SNAQ the first moment of truth was when the app was released to the public in 2019. We quickly got a few hundred users but the app was not yet what people expected. Many basic product features were missing — as is the usual case with an MVP. Additionally, we learned that we needed to work on managing our users’ expectations in a better way. Moving from an MVP to a usable product took about 100 releases.
Food classification is a straightforward problem: identify the fruit, vegetable, or meal in front of you. For humans, this is easy, yet for our phone, this is quite a complex task. One reason is that a large degree of visual variation exists between images of the same dish. It’s not only a problem of comparing apples and oranges, but also one of comparing apples and apples — and identifying them as the same.
We started SNAQ after the partner of one of our founders got diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. This made us experience many of the everyday challenges. Today we support people with diabetes and also without diabetes to take the guesswork out of mealtime decisions*.
Our app helps to count carbs, protein, and fat content of meals by snapping a photo and provides insights on what keeps glucose levels in range after meals.
