Introducing Gluroo

(This post was updated May 2, 2024.)

Diabetes is hard. But it doesn’t have to be as hard as it is. My family joined the community of people managing type 1 diabetes in early 2020 when our son was diagnosed. We learned lots over the following months about how to mitigate the impact on our son’s — and our — lives.

Over those first months, we especially noticed that too much of our mental energy was spent thinking about and worrying about diabetes. Recognizing that a lifelong chronic condition is a marathon and not a sprint, it was worth investing in a tool to help.

Gluroo was born.

But what is Gluroo?

Gluroo is comprehensive digital diabetes assistant that runs on Android and iPhones. It helps you log and track all things related to the diabetes that is impacting you or your family. It’s not just for the person with diabetes, but for their spouse, their parents, their kids, their clinic or coach, or whoever else helps make sure they’re the healthiest version of themselves.

As a veteran engineering and product leader, one of the ways I’ve rallied my teams around a vision is a set of “We Believe” statements describing what’s important about what we’re doing and how it’ll help. That background then helps inform the day-to-day decisions of the team building the product and operating the service.

At Gluroo, we believe:

• That diabetes management is important but doesn’t need to be so time-consuming or exhausting.
• That diabetes — especially in new onset cases and kids — is a team effort requiring communication and shared understanding.
• That learning about how food, insulin, and exercise (among many other factors) interact for each specific individual is fundamental to good glycemic control and that logging is the best way to build this learning.
• That group chat messaging is a valuable framework and tool for efficient logging and communication of however much or little you want to track.
• That automatic integrations with devices including CGMs, pumps, pens, and exercise and nutrition collectors are essential to creating a comprehensive log to provide the best insights.
• And that alerts and notifications are most useful when they’re coordinated across the team. They should always be actionable and integrated with logging and communication.

Over the last several years, these beliefs have helped shape the design of Gluroo. My family started using the initial app after I’d been working on it for just two weeks. We’ve been “dogfooding” it ever since. We’re grateful to a handful of other families who’ve provided early feedback in 2021, and since then we’ve grown.

Boy have we grown! Now Gluroo has over 45,000 users in over 100 countries worldwide!

Important Limitations

Gluroo is available in both the Apple iPhone App Store and the Google Play Android Store. It is not yet available for commercial use: we invite you to join tens of thousands of testers who are using Gluroo with careful attention to the details, always double-checking data with the 1st-party apps. We’re grateful for their extensive feedback.

Dosing decisions should not be made based on Gluroo. The user should follow instructions on the continuous glucose monitoring system. Gluroo is not intended to replace self-monitoring practices as advised by a physician.

Gluroo is beta-quality software. It is unfinished and has known and unknown problems that can have unintended consequences. These consequences may include injury, mental distress, or even death. We’re making sincere efforts to make the product as useful and safe as possible. After all, we use it in our families too. But it’s an unfinished product and needs to be treated as such.

Install the App to Help Test Gluroo

Just Install Gluroo from the Apple App store or Install Gluroo from the Google Play Store.