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Glucose Monitoring Made Easy: My Take on Abbott’s Lingo
by Suzanne Kantra on January 14, 2025
In March 2024, the FDA approved the first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). These devices open the door for anyone – not just those with a prescription for managing diabetes or prediabetes – to better understand their blood sugar levels and how they impact overall health.
Glucose monitoring impacts much more than prediabetes and diabetes. It influences your energy, mood, sleep, and metabolism. High blood sugar fluctuations can lead to weight gain, poor sleep, and even long-term health risks like heart disease. That’s where over-the-counter devices, like Abbott’s Lingo, come in – empowering anyone to take control of their health by offering insights into how food, exercise, and stress affect their body.
Hands-On with Abbott’s Lingo
I tried the Lingo for two weeks to see if it delivers on its promise to make monitoring accessible and easy to use. For the most part, it succeeds.
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Applying the sensor is straightforward: you press the applicator to the back of your arm and feel a slight prick. While it’s noticeable on the first day, especially for side sleepers like me, the device becomes unintrusive after that – unless you bump it or accidentally pull it off while changing tight clothes, which happened to me at the end of my testing.
The Lingo app pairs seamlessly with the sensor and offers a clean, intuitive interface. At its core is the Lingo Count, which translates blood sugar increases and dips into an easy-to-understand metric for how well you’re managing your levels throughout the day. These counts, along with icons indicating when you ate or exercised, appear on a graph of your glucose levels. For me, it was immediately obvious that my morning dirty chai, which has honey and two shots of espresso, makes my levels rise significantly. I also learned I could manage the spike by drinking my dirty chai while walking the dog.
However, the app isn’t perfect. Logging meals and exercise is a manual process. I would have preferred integration with food-tracking apps like Lose It! or Apple Health. On the plus side, Lingo provides helpful educational content, and you can opt into “Challenges” that invite you to test small, actionable changes to improve your control over fluctuations.
How Lingo Compares to Stelo
I just started testing Dexcom’s Stelo, Lingo’s main OTC competitor, and found that it has its own strengths and weaknesses. Setup is simple, and Stelo also provides access to real-time levels and trends, just like Lingo.
Stelo’s app is more basic than Lingo’s, though. Glucose levels are displayed on a separate screen from the food and exercise logging, making it harder to visually connect your actions to your levels. However, I appreciate that Stelo integrates data from the Apple Health app, allowing you to view relevant information like sleep, activity, and steps alongside your manually logged meals and exercise. By combining this data, the app provides a more comprehensive day-by-day view of your activity than Lingo, even if mapping this back to your glucose level is more of a chore.
Aesthetically, Stelo looks like a medical patch, featuring a small gray plastic puck (approximately 25 by 28 mm) surrounded by a large ring of visible adhesive. In contrast, Lingo has a sleek white circular design. Although Lingo is larger (approximately 30mm in diameter), I appreciate its more polished appearance, which I didn’t mind showing off when wearing short sleeves.
Pricing and Availability
Lingo is available without a prescription – or subscription – at two price points: $49 for two weeks or $89 for four weeks on HelloLingo.com. You can purchase it directly from HelloLingo.com. Stelo is priced similarly, providing a comparable entry point into the world of continuous monitoring.
[Image credit: Techlicious]
