Tracking My Blood Glucose With AI: What I Built and What I Learned
My blood glucose readings live in Apple Health. Neat, automatic, doing exactly what that app was designed for.
But staring at a list of numbers in a health app has never really worked for me. I wanted to see the data — trends, patterns, the story behind the digits. So I did something about it.
🩸 From Apple Health to Google Sheets
The first step was getting the data somewhere I could work with it.
I asked Claude to help me build an iOS Shortcut that prompts me for my reading, then writes it into the Apple Health app and straight into a Google Sheet.
I’m not a developer. Shortcuts can get fiddly surprisingly quickly.
Claude walked me through exactly what to build, step by step, and the whole thing came together without a single moment of wanting to throw my phone across the room!
One tap. A quick input. The data lands in the Sheet. Job done.
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Snippet of the iOS shortcut
📊 Then We Built the Dashboard
With readings flowing into the spreadsheet, I asked Claude to help me build a simple webpage that pulls from the Sheet and displays everything visually.
Charts. Trends. At-a-glance summaries. The kind of thing that would have taken me a lost weekend to figure out alone, or nudged me towards yet another app subscription I didn’t really want.
The result is a personal dashboard. My data, presented clearly, entirely on my terms.
📈 Why It’s Actually Useful
A single reading tells you where you are right now. A week’s worth tells you a story.
Once you can see your levels laid out over time, patterns start to emerge that you’d never spot in a list. Do they creep up after certain meals? Dip at a particular time of day? Those things don’t jump out from raw numbers — but they absolutely do on a chart.
For anyone keeping a closer eye on their health, that kind of visibility is quietly powerful.
⚡ What I Like About This Setup
A few things genuinely stand out.
Claude wrote the Shortcut; no developer skills needed on my part. Logging takes about five seconds, which means I actually do it. The dashboard makes patterns visible at a glance. The whole thing costs nothing beyond a bit of time to set up. No subscription. No third-party app holding your health data hostage. It’s a proper win.
⚠️ Let’s Be Honest
This isn’t a medical tool.
It’s a personal tracking aid; not a diagnostic dashboard.
If your readings are worrying you, your GP is the right call, not refreshing a webpage.
Context matters too; a reading without knowing whether you’ve just eaten or done a workout can paint a misleading picture.
And if you’re storing health data in Google Sheets, it’s worth taking five minutes to make sure that Sheet is properly locked down before you start.
🔁 The Bigger Picture
What I like most about this little project isn’t really the dashboard. It’s what it represents.
I took something I was already doing, made it faster to capture, and turned the output into something genuinely useful, without specialist knowledge, without paying for anything, and without losing a weekend to it.
That’s what AI-assisted workflows are quietly brilliant at. Not the big flashy stuff. The small, practical wins that make day-to-day life a little more manageable.
Are you tracking anything similar, or have you used AI to help make sense of your own data? Leave a comment; I’d genuinely love to hear what you’ve built.