Continuous glucose monitoring: data management and evaluation by patients and health care professionals – current situation and developments

Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) technology represents a valuable tool for diabetic patients to control and regulate their blood glucose (BG) levels and to reduce adverse metabolic states, for example, by defining glucose alarm thresholds that alert users if the glucose value crosses to an undesired range. Improvement of CGM technology is ongoing, but there are barriers which confine the usefulness of CGM systems. The utility is mainly defined by the operability of the specific device and also by the provided benefit of available CGM software solutions. In order to take best advantage of diabetes therapy, users should be adequately educated in how to use their CGM system and how to interpret the collected data. Different CGM software applications provide partially different CGM reports and statistics. The standardization of this information also would be conducive to the best possible diabetes management.