Glucose Buddy app

The Glucose Buddy app allows you to manually enter your blood glucose readings together with notes about food intake. You can pair it with your blood glucose meter if compatible. You can also enter your carbohydrate consumption, insulin dosages and activities. This can be automatically included from Apple Health Data if enabled. You can use the graph function to track your blood glucose levels over a selected period. Reports can be downloaded and shared.

The meal IQ section enables you to take photos of your meal, and then log your blood glucose. It will grade your meal depending on how it impacted your blood glucose to help you to make better food choices. You can share your results with other users, including your exercise and nutrition goals. 

For the complete app description, go to either Google Play(external link) (Android) or iTunes(external link) (Apple) and for a detailed review, see reviews below.

User review

Reviewer: Member of the public, Auckland, New Zealand
Date of review: September 2021
Comments: Meal IQ gives carbohydrate calculations from a photo without leaving the app.

Clinical review

Reviewer: Angela Lambie, Pharmacist, Waitematā District Health Board
Date of review: April 2020
Platform: Apple
Version: 5.234
Comments: Many issues with the earlier versions have been resolved with upgraded versions of the app. The premium version enables an HbA1c calculator and more frequent blood glucose graphs and reports (default is weekly for the free version). 
Safety concerns: No.
New Zealand relevance: The app can pair with blood glucose monitors that are available in New Zealand. Units can be adjusted to suit New Zealand, eg, recording weight in kilograms and HbA1c in percentages.

Clinical review

Reviewer: Gail Keane, Registered Nurse, Diabetes and Cardiovascular Self-management Coordinator, Waitematā PHO
Date of review: July 2016
Platform: Android
Version: 1.0
Comments: Overall this app is not particularly helpful or easy to use and I would be hesitant to recommend it. It may have limited use in a younger user who is more technically savvy and has type 1 diabetes, although I think there would be better apps than this. For someone with type 2 diabetes who often already has established co-morbidities such as cardiovascular disease, I would more likely recommend the MyFitnessPal app as it gives a greater range of recording options in terms of recording portion size and calories, and provides comprehensive nutritional information. There also seems to be a better connection between exercise and food intake on MyFitnessPal in terms of overall management. The flow and navigation of the Glucose Buddy app is poor – it is tedious to constantly switch between screens to record information. It is frustrating that settings such as measurement in kilograms do not automatically carry across to the weight section as it defaults to pounds. On the whole the app is cumbersome and awkward to use. 
New Zealand relevance: Measurements can be stored as metric units such as kilograms and centimetres, as used in New Zealand, but this function does not appear to work very well. Has the option for the user to record blood glucose measurements in mmol/L and HbA1C as percentages – units used in New Zealand.