Some excellent smart phone apps have been developed to help with management of your diet, insulin injections, diabetes medications, blood glucose and exercise.

Goal Tracker

This free app from the American Association of Diabetes Educators allows you to keep track of your goals. There are 7 categories of goal you can set and monitor with the app:

For every goal you set, you input how you intend to achieve it and what could stop you. Then you will receive reminders on your smart phone, encouraging you to continue with what you need to do to meet that goal.

Goal Tracker helps you to self-manage diabetes and provides a lot of support. It gives you access to the Goal Tracker community, where users post their diabetes-friendly recipes and share tips on how they achieved their goals.

The app allows you to find out more about the foods you eat and recommends what you should be eating. You can monitor what you eat at every meal and between meals. It shows nutritional data, such as how many fats, carbohydrates and calories you consume throughout the day, during one week or over several months.
ShotPut

This insulin injection app lets you set up and manage your own schedule by entering when you last injected and when you need your next injection. ShotPut will send an alert to your phone when another shot is required.

MedSimple

This medication management app alerts you when to take your diabetes medicines and the correct dosage to take.

You can keep track of all the drugs you require and, when you enter pharmacy and prescriber information, MedSimple will send you an alert when you need to renew a prescription.

MedSimple also provides money-saving details about different prescription drugs, coupons and patient assistance programs.

Dexcom G5 Mobile

This app provides a continuous glucose monitoring system, with reports every five minutes. Without any need for testing, you see almost instantly how various types of food affect you and the impact of exercise and stress. It also shows you the best time to take your diabetes medications.

Dexcom G5 allows you to send data to another device, so you can share diabetes information with your doctor or a family member. The app works with the iPhone, iPad and iPod and an Android version will be available from early 2016.

Every five minutes it will do a glucose reading, so you know whether your level is up or down. The app can be set to send you an alert when your blood glucose reaches a particular high or drops too low.

The sensor is easily inserted into your abdomen and lasts for around a week. The cost is about $90 for each sensor, but this could be covered by your health insurance.

The cost of setting up the Dexcom G5 system can be close to $1000, unless you are upgrading from the Dexcom G4, in which case it could be free or might cost up to $299 for new components.

Telcare

Telcare Diabetes Pal is a free app that works on any Android device and with iOS. It does not require a glucose meter. You enter your own test results, diabetes medication and food intake so it can produce a pie chart, line graph or bar graph.

If you use a glucose meter, Telcare has also created a diabetes app to allow a designated family member or health-care provider to see your data. It creates graphs direct from the meter, with no need for you to enter any data.

Charity Miles

This is a great app to motivate anyone with diabetes to exercise more. It gets sponsors to donate money to charity for the distances you achieve and keeps track of your mileage. Nominate a charity from the list provided and a sponsor will send money based on your results, up to 10 cents per mile for cycling, up to 25 cents per mile for walking or running.