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Comment by thecosas | Hacker News Reader

T1D here who has been using Dexcom G6 for many years now. Interesting to see the differences between Stelo and G7 which are built on the same platform.

Curious if anything is driving the increase in wear time other than battery life savings from reporting back fewer readings.

  CGM:                   G7 / Stelo
  Wear time:             10 / 15 days
  Time between readings:  5 / 15 minutes

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I'm not sure how much I can say; I don't work for a CGM company, but my company is very interested in diabetes. There are non-device reasons you can't use a CGM indefinitely. The site becomes less reliable over time, and it varies from peron to person. I'm not sure if the Stelo has addressed any of those, or if the G7 was overly cautious, or something else, but there are biological things happening at the site that affect the time too.

Ah, that makes sense. I'm certain we'll never "know" but just found it interesting and was curious if people knew other trade-offs they may have been making for increased wear time, especially given that would offer a sharp reduction in cost over time for patients (and their insurance companies, etc).

A 50% increase in wear time is HUGE in my opinion.

I seem to remember there was a "trick" with the g6 where you remove and reinsert the transmitter to get it to last longer... I suspect the time estimates are quite conservative.

Yep, I've definitely used my G6 for two sessions using "tricks". It would definitely get wonky towards the end of that time period, but it worked.

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