My opinion is the best way to avoid alarm fatigue (which I think is a very significant issue involved here) is to greatly reduce the frequency of alarms.
If it was me, I would significantly bump the overnight BG up. I would target 180 immediately via significant basal adjustments. This night. In one shot. Not slowly. That is me. Stop the alarms. Get a good night sleep. Don’t depend on whatever auto whatever doesn’t seem to be working anyway.
Then, when you are sleeping through the night at an elevated BG with no alarms and no auto whatever kicking in with modified basal settings then start tweaking the basal for appropriate hours based on what you see in the cgm for nighttime patterns and slowly start bringing the overnight BG down.
IMHO it will take many nights of no alarms to get past alarm fatigue. At a certain point, the alarms will start waking you up. Currently, (still all my opinion) your hippocampus is filtering out the sound of the alarm before it even hits the frontal lobe. Just like often times you don’t even hear the washing machine running until somebody asks something about and specifically draws your attention to it.
But that is me.
Ask a dozen people and you likely get a dozen and half suggestions on how to proceed.
As @MM2 said, it’s a value I’m able to calculate using a Medtronic sensor. It comes from the Isig, which I don’t think is visible with any other sensor…
I agree totally with this. Also, if your alarm sounds the same every night, your brain just starts filtering it out. I think if you change the way your alarm sounds (glass jar full of coins some nights, metal bedside table other night, light turning on other nights, blender full of marbles other nights) it would be more unexpected and thus more likely to wake you up.
I suspect this device is a type of assistive technology meant primarily for people who are deaf or hard of hearing who need sound converted into some sort of visual stimuli.
I have also seen posts in the past, where people used earthquake detector apps, with their dexcom receiver sitting on phone or iPod. Not sure that would work with Minmed tubed pump.
I have auto-off set on my pump (MM 523) to 12 hours. This vibrates (due to my setting), and is my backup for times I don’t respond to overnight dexcom low alerts. But also goes off on the occasional late sleep in, and 12 hours pass since previous pump button pressing!
Beacher you are right the alams are chosen by the user in xdrip and I guess Spike.
My approach is to assume my system will have a variability of 20% so I set my first low alarm at 5mmoll/L that is plus or minus 20% will be 4 or 6. Just a bleep. Then a louder alarm that goes on indefinitely at 4.4 and another at 3.8 the same.
For the high I have the single bleep at 7.5 and the louder goes on forever at 8.5. I can turn the alarms off from my Pebble watch.
So yes the alarms are infinitely variable, There are snooze settings for all high or all low or all alarms.
So for instance if I go to bed with BG fairly high I snooze the high alarms for 2 hours so only get woken up if my sugar does not drop in that time.
Only faint quibble is the actual alarms which I think are the ones from the phone which are all rather similar and musical and nothing as loud as the siren ones on Dexcom. Not worked out how to download any more dramatic ones.
I wonder if the alert sound from a Medtronic 670 is enough to trigger the Sonic Alert device. I know that the sound from a Medtronic 723 is a quiet, thin, high pitch. Nothing bold like a Dexcom alert or an alert on a phone.
I’m not sure what it needs to be, but the 670G is quieter than the old Medtronic pumps. I have it on the highest volume, and it’s just not an attention grabber. My old Medtronic used to shriek.
And to stick with my scary hospital comments, there was a study about alarms and nurses. Nurses were found to respond to a frightening small number of alarms because of exactly this. They were also looking for ways to retrain them to react to patient room alarms.
I was hoping putting the pump up by my head would work. It didn’t last night. I think I’ll try vibrate tonight… maybe that will do the trick. Truth is, I often don’t even hear them during the day… talk about being desensitized.
Just saw this… so you’re saying to run up my sugar, ditch everything, and just sleep??? That’s old school… that’s my kind of solution.
But I get it. Try to hit reset. And you’re talking about starting at or above a 180?? I’m not sure that’ll hold with my current settings though. I’m still going too low.
Had to go take my son to the hospital tonight (he’s good now), but the whole thing left me eating crappy food when I got home. A 180+ is definitely in the cards tonight.
I don’t know, but it could probably be tested out very quickly, and the device returned if it doesn’t work. I remember reading that the sensitivity on the device was adjustable.
