Parents of small children need real follow apps
The Tandem Mobi has no way for a parent to follow pump data in real time, and Dexcom's Follow app leaves out the alerts that matter most when glucose drops fast. For a young child, the follower is the person who acts.
When an adult with type 1 diabetes gets an alarm, the person who needs to act is holding the phone. With a small child, that’s rarely true. The child is at school, at preschool, at a friend’s house or asleep. They can’t reliably recognise a low or explain it. The person who acts is a parent, a teacher or a grandparent, and they see what’s happening through a follow app.
That makes follow apps part of the treatment, not an extra. Today, for our combination of a Tandem Mobi pump and a Dexcom G7 sensor, they fall short in two specific ways.
1. You can’t follow the Tandem Mobi
The Tandem Mobi with Control-IQ+ makes thousands of decisions a day on our child’s behalf. A parent who isn’t standing next to the pump can’t see any of them as they happen:
- how much insulin is on board;
- whether the lunch bolus at school was given, and how big it was;
- whether Control-IQ+ has stopped basal insulin because glucose is falling, or is giving extra;
- pump alarms: an occlusion, an empty cartridge, a low battery, a lost sensor connection.
What exists today is retrospective. The Tandem Mobi app uploads pump data to Tandem’s cloud service, Tandem Source, about once an hour, and only when the app is running and has a connection. Parents can view it with a guardian account. Tandem’s own user guide states that the uploads don’t happen in real time and that Source isn’t meant for remote monitoring by caregivers. The app’s store listing says the same.
There is one step forward. Tandem owns the Sugarmate app, and since version 4.2.0 in March 2026 it can use Tandem Source as a data source and share with followers in more countries, including Sweden. But it’s glucose only: pump and insulin data “will be added at a later date”. On its earnings call in May 2026, Tandem’s CEO spoke of future plans to add insulin data for users and their loved ones. He gave no date.
Other systems sold in Europe show that following insulin data is possible:
- CamAPS FX has a Companion feature where caregivers see real-time glucose, insulin delivery and alerts.
- Medtronic’s MiniMed 780G has the CareLink Connect app, where care partners can view glucose and pump data and get alerts.
It’s not that every competitor does it: the Omnipod 5 doesn’t offer caregivers a pump view either. But it can be done, with regulatory approval, and families choosing a pump for a small child should know it’s missing on the Mobi.
Some families build it themselves. The open-source tconnectsync copies data from Tandem Source to Nightscout, where apps like LoopFollow can show it. It’s impressive work, but it’s unofficial, it depends on undocumented interfaces that can change without warning, and its own documentation warns of a lag of more than 30 minutes. A parent shouldn’t need to run a server to know whether the lunch bolus went in.
2. Dexcom Follow leaves out the alerts that matter most
For glucose, we use Dexcom Follow. It’s reliable and we’re grateful for it. But the person following gets fewer and blunter alerts than the person wearing the sensor.
According to Dexcom’s G7 user guide for Europe (and the US guide is the same):
| Alert | Dexcom G7 app (on the child’s phone) | Dexcom Follow (on the parent’s phone) |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent Low (3.1 mmol/L) | Yes | Yes, fixed at 3.1 |
| Urgent Low Soon (predicted low within 20 min) | Yes | No |
| Low, High | Yes | Yes |
| Falling Fast / Rising Fast | Yes | No |
| Signal loss, sensor problems | Yes | Only “No Data” |
In plain terms: if glucose drops from 9 to 5 mmol/L in twenty minutes after a burst of play, the child’s phone can warn that it’s falling fast, and that a low is coming. The parent following gets nothing until the value crosses the low threshold, and by then the fall may be at its steepest. Dexcom reportedly previewed Urgent Low Soon for followers in July 2026, but as of November 2026 we haven’t found it in the current Follow app.
There are other limits too. A follower’s data is always a little older than the sharer’s, because Share sends values every five minutes. Nothing arrives at all if the child’s phone loses its connection. And follower alerts aren’t copies of the child’s alarms: they’re the follower’s own threshold notifications.
For an adult, the main app’s alerts go to the person who acts. For a small child, the child’s phone is often in a school bag or on a teacher’s desk. The predictive and rate-of-change alerts exist because they give someone time to act. In our case, that someone is the follower, and the follower doesn’t get them.
What should change
None of this needs new science. It needs device makers to treat caregivers as users:
- A real-time follow view for the Tandem Mobi: insulin on board, boluses, Control-IQ+ activity and pump alarms, sent the same way glucose is today, not hourly.
- The same alerts in Dexcom Follow as in the main app: Urgent Low Soon and Falling Fast first. Let the follower choose which ones to receive.
- Alerts that say why. “No Data” is not enough when the cause is a failed sensor or a phone left behind; the follower needs to know whether to drive to school.
- Pediatric use cases in the requirements. Control-IQ+ is cleared for children from two years old. Children that young don’t manage their own alarms, so a pump cleared for them should come with a way for caregivers to follow it.
If you’re a parent with the same setup, telling your diabetes team, Tandem and Dexcom what you miss is worth it. Companies prioritise what they hear about.
Facts checked 2026-11-11. App features change; if something here is out of date, please tell me.