Cheap smartwatches with CGM… What do we think?

For some reason, (I couldn’t possibly imagine what!) Cheap smartwatches with non-invasive CGM started popping up in my social feeds, making all sorts of claims of greatness.

Given the price, I thought we might as well see how well they work…

First up is this one, the KS01, from somewhere in China.

KS01 Smartwatch with integrated non-invasive Glucose Monitoring

At less than £25, it was obviously a bargain, and a worthy experiment.

So what does it do?

Features:

  • Blood pressure
  • Glucose monitoring
  • Blood oxygen
  • Heart rate
  • Pedometer
  • Body temperature

Clearly, this must be a very efficient little device. What I will say for it is that the battery lasts a long time, and the pedometer is reasonable.

Sensors on the KS01

I’ve never managed to get a heart rate reading from it, nor a blood oxygen output.

The body temperature sensing seems to be sensible, and the pedometer matched my other step counters, or near enough.

But the blood pressure readings are, well, questionable really, when compared to a proper home blood pressure reader. They certainly aren’t useable for anything other than a bit of fun.

But what of the glucose? Well that’s what we’re here to talk about…

Non-invasive glucose monitoring

This little watch takes a reading every ten minutes, and stores them on your phone in a way that’s impossible to export. The app looks like the picture below.

Screenshot of the KS01 phone app

But there’s an important thing to highlight. It requires that you specify your fasting glucose (from a fingerprick) which it uses as a datum about which it takes your readings.

In this image, I’ve set that value to 4 mmol/l (which is well below my 5.5mmol/l target value). When you compare it to a Dexcom G6 from the same day, you can see a fair amount of difference…

Dexcom G6 24 hr screenshot

While the watch won’t show the overnight compression lows, the variability of the readings is noticeably different.

A comparison on actual values

The next plot takes a day with the watch normalised to my target value, and then Dexcom data points aligned to the watch ones. The Dexcom points were the nearest point by minutes to the watch readings.

Plot comparing Dexcom G6 and KS01

It’s pretty clear from the overlay of the two graphs that the sensors on the watch are neither accurate or responsive.

In many ways, there is no point in them.

To be fair to the device, the sellers don’t claim it has a medical use, and describes them as “consumer product” sensors, but still…

They are of little use to anyone.

The takeaways are clear

The glucose sensing in this particular watch is of little use to anyone. It doesn’t reflect reality. I suspect, if you were non-diabetic, you’d see a nice flat line, but who really knows? It might still be lumpy. At random times.

And that’s really the takeaway. The sensors in this thing don’t really do anything useful. They create some ups and downs, but don’t give you any trustworthy information about what might be happening to your levels.

But for less than £25, what did you expect?

4 Comments

  1. Thanks . I would not desire this watch , for free. I would not use it. Bad, inaccurate information is worse than a zero.

  2. You can find a large number of such products on Chinese e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Pinduoduo (which is equivalent to America’s TeMu). They are not regulated or certified, but they all claim to be able to measure blood sugar non-invasively. They come in various forms, such as watches, phones, rings, tablets, all-in-one machines, and even blood pressure monitors.

  3. For me a good reliable watch with a buzz every half an hour or so to remind me to look at it is the finishing touch to my CGM. Currently my problem is that I cannot find a set up that works with my Libre 2/Xiaomi Poco phone/xDrip+. Tried Fitbit with Glance and Sentinel but neither stay linked for very long.

    Anyone got a good combination out there?

    Just started with Dexcom G6 as at least I should get some professional advice if there are any problems but need to buy a new phone as the iphone it runs on is old and out of security backup. However alarms are not nearly as flexible as Libre/xDrip.

    I know I can run xDrip on the G6 but then I am back on finding a watch and phone that work with it. Anyway my early experience of G6 is that even with calibration it is no better than Libre 2.

    • You can always use Dexcom BYODA and xDrip in tandem, with BYODA as the collector and xDrip for your alarms and watch broadcast, which gives you the xDrip flexibility.

      Garmin has an official Dexcom watchface if you don’t want to use xDrip.

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