Hi all …
Does anyone use the InPen ?
I’m just curious of the Benefits, or cons
Please let me know your opinion
Thanks
Maggie I think there were some member(s) that have used the InPen, hopefully they post their reactions.
Some of the advantages would be if you wanted to track your IOB like a pump does. It integrates with an app on your phone and gives you dosing history like a pump.
It can have settings in the app to remind your to check your BG if you want.
The app can also integrate with your CGM and suggest how much insulin you should take, stuff like that. Tell you the insulin in your pen is getting old. Other things like that.
It can give you a full history of all your insulin dosing to look at in the app.
The pens can only do increments of 1/2 unit, so you don’t get the same small granularity of dosing that you can get with a pump.
The pen does not automatically record basal (but you can manually enter your basal into the app, so you can still look at that if you wish).
The pen only lasts one year.
The company that makes it (Companion Medical) was recently bought by Medtronic. That can’t be good.
And - just my personal feeling - I don’t really need an app telling me to eat carbs if I am low. People know by now that if they are low they should eat carbs.
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If you like diabetes apps and dosing advice and logging and stuff like that, it might be good to look at.
This is a helpful informational page:
I’ve been considering it, as someone already on MDI, mostly for easy logging/tracking of my bolus dosing. I would probably not use dose calculator features and would want to see if I could turn off as many “suggestions” as possible. Half-unit increments may also be a step up in granularity for someone used to typical insulin pens.
I didn’t like it when I used it because I am stuck with the libre(Cigna $60 every 90 days for libre vs $3800 for Dexcom), and it constantly had alarms for eating meals, which I often have odd times for when I am working. the lack of Cgm(although it now works with dexcom g5,g6), changing cartridges was a 3 minute chore, it won’t tell you how much insulin is left in the cartridge (like the novopen4, 5, 6, echo, humapen savvio, etc). and the actual insulin delivery felt like the 20 year old insulin pens…the Owen Mumford autopen may not tell you how much Insulin is left, but the delivery is much smoother…you just have to remember to log your Insulin. the in pen xdrip feature did not work for me, but I have a Razer2 phone which was not quite as popular.
I use InPen. It’s never been a very good app. Since Medtronic purchase, I expect it to get worse. I gave them a list of 18 or 19 things that could be improved. Since then, they completely rewrote the app and did not address any of my concerns, and, in fact, completely screwed up the user interface, which, while not great, had been sort of okay. Problems I have experienced include:
- Does not provided a recommendation about how long to wait before eating after an insulin dose
- Logs a bunch of insulin I never took. One day it logged 397u of insulin I had never taken. Those all have to be marked as “insulin I didn’t take”, which means marking them as “prime” doses. They can’t be deleted.
- There is no way to track injection sites. See Diabetes:M app to see how that should work.
- There is no way to make notes.
- No way to associate carbs with specific foods eaten, because there is no way to make notes.
- No way to remove erroneous entries from the log book.
- IOB is shown to only one decimal place.
- Some insulin doesn’t show up on the home screen, althought they’re in the log book. Fixing this requires rebooting the phone.
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- When entering BG values from CGM, there is no way to enter the arrows that are shown on the CGM. Again, see the Diabetes:M app to see how that should work.
- It takes too long for doses to show up. I end up adding them manually, and then having to go back later to delete the manual entries when the dose finally shows up.
- Sometimes the dose is inaccurate. For instance, I might take 10u, but it shows up as 9.5, or I might take 6.5u and it shows up as 6.0. This happens most often after changing the cartridge, but it happens at other times as well
- Whereas the algorithm seems to take account of IOB, at least sometimes, it does nothing to account for carbs eaten. This makes it pretty much useless. The algorithm seems to be mind-numbingly useless.
- I didn’t list all 18 items because some of them were fixed when they rewrote the app, like basal insulin not showing on the home screen. This now shows there.
Dean1
Welcome to FUD, @Dean1!