Ultrahuman M1/M2 Live real-time glucose tracking explained

What is real-time glucose tracking?

A continuous glucose monitor tracks glucose in the fluid under your skin 24/7.

It enables you to track time in range, the share of the day your glucose sits inside a target window.

The clinical convention comes from a 2019 international consensus panel, which set that window at 70 to 180 mg/dL for people living with diabetes.

Ultrahuman scores you against a tighter window of 70 to 110 mg/dL.

What is a CGM?

M1 Live runs on the FreeStyle Libre CGM, while M2 Live, the US version, runs on Abbott Lingo, which is an over-the-counter sensor that doesn’t require a prescription.

A hair-thin filament sits just under the skin of your upper arm, held by an adhesive patch. It goes in through a hollow needle that's immediately withdrawn, leaving only the filament.

One sensor runs for 14 days and isn't reusable. It's water-resistant to 1 meter for up to 30 minutes, so showering and swimming are fine.

The filament never touches a blood vessel. It sits in the fluid around your cells, where glucose arrives shortly after it reaches your blood.

Measured directly in eight healthy adults, that transfer took 5 to 6 minutes, which is why a fast spike reaches your phone slightly after your blood has done it.

Ultrahuman M1/M2 Live features

The CGM supplies a glucose reading every few minutes, which shows rises, falls, spikes, and crashes.

On its own, this data is hard to interpret, so Ultrahuman builds a number of metrics on top:

• Metabolic Score: A daily 0 to 100 score that weighs your glucose variability, your average level, and how much of the day you spent in the optimal range. It resets to 100 each midnight and moves with what you eat, how you train, how you sleep and how stressed you are. In Ultrahuman's published study of 105 adults, a higher score went with lower insulin resistance on a blood test. That link was moderate, so the score points in the right direction rather than standing in for one.
• Food Score: A 1 to 10 rating for individual foods, built from the glucose peak in the two hours after eating, the size of the change, and how long you spent above target. It shows how your own glucose responded to that food on that occasion. The same meal can move different people differently.
• Metabolic nudges: Prompts through the day based on what your glucose is doing at that moment.
• Open Glucose Database (OGDb): A public database built from 1.18 billion data points, showing how people responded to particular foods. Useful before you eat something rather than after.
• Community insights and trend correlations: How your response to a food compares with other members, and which of your own metrics move together over time.

The app also syncs with Apple Health, Google Fit, Strava, MyFitnessPal and Clue, and subscriptions include access to ACSM-certified performance coaches.

Glucose is impacted by sleep and stress, so the data is presented alongside the Ultrahuman Ring, which tracks both of these metrics to offer a fuller view of your health.

What’s a normal glucose reading?

One study tracked 153 participants without diabetes and found they typically spent 96% of the time between 70 and 140 mg/dL, sitting near 98 mg/dL. In participants over 60, it ran a little higher, near 104 mg/dL.

Another study put sensors on 57 people for two to four weeks. Among those counted as normal by standard tests, about a quarter showed a volatile glucose pattern, reaching pre-diabetic levels up to 15% of the time.

The effect of sleep is also highlighted in an Ultrahuman study. We looked at 227,860 nights from 5,859 adults wearing both the Ring and the CGM. Nights following an irregular sleep pattern ran 6.4 mg/dL higher in overnight glucose, and time in a healthy glucose range was 13.9% lower.

What Ultrahuman's data shows

Ultrahuman's published study followed 53 members without diabetes and 52 with prediabetes for 14 days.

The two groups sit about 10 mg/dL apart. Their swings are closer together, and a fasting test doesn't see those at all.