At the Tire Rack Street Survival driving school, we had an amazing opportunity to put SugarDrive to the test with real-world driving conditions.
During the event, Evelyn — who lives with Type 1 diabetes — used SugarDrive in her car to monitor her blood sugar while learning critical driving skills.
What we discovered during this event helped make SugarDrive even better.
Evelyn used her iPhone’s personal hotspot to allow SugarDrive to access real-time blood sugar readings. Each time she entered the car, she enabled the hotspot, and SugarDrive connected smoothly.
However, we noticed an unusual pattern:
When Evelyn left the car for a classroom session and returned, SugarDrive was still showing a blood sugar value — but it had stopped updating.
Restarting the iPhone’s hotspot (turning it off and back on) immediately resolved the issue, but we wanted to know why.
Further testing at home revealed the root cause:
Even though the iPhone shows the hotspot slider as “on,” the hotspot itself quietly disables when no active devices are connected.
Once SugarDrive went out of range (while Evelyn was away from the car), the iPhone stopped broadcasting — even though it looked like it hadn’t.
Simply toggling the hotspot off and back on reactivates the connection. In my next post I will describe how SugarDrive firmware features have been added to inform the user of conditions like this. You can see some of Evelyn’s driving exercises in the video below.
Every time we test SugarDrive in real-life conditions, we learn something new that helps us make it even more reliable and user-friendly.
This discovery is a small example of how much thought and care goes into making sure SugarDrive supports people with Type 1 diabetes wherever life takes them — even behind the wheel.