A Custom Smartwatch Built To Make Diabetes Monitoring Easier For A Kid

Living with Type 1 diabetes means tracking blood glucose constantly, and for kids especially, the devices built to make that easier can become their own source of friction. Andrew Childs built a smartwatch for his nine-year-old son specifically to get that friction out of the way.

What They Built

The obvious commercial answer — an Apple Watch paired to a Dexcom continuous glucose monitor — works, but strapping an Apple Watch onto a nine-year-old’s wrist is, in Childs’s words, a recipe for disaster. His alternative is a custom-built watch around an ESP32-S3, with a 1.69-inch TFT IPS display, a LiPo battery, an accelerometer for activity monitoring, and a vibration motor for haptic feedback, all on a custom PCB.

How They Did It

The hardest part wasn’t the display or the sensors — it was getting a stable Bluetooth Low Energy connection to his son’s iPhone, since the watch needs that link to pull CGM data in real time. Past that hurdle, Childs had the case made by a local 3D printing company and sourced custom-cut, silkscreened glass for the face, landing on a result that looks notably more polished than a typical first hardware project.

Why It’s Worth Your Time

It’s a build with an obvious, personal reason to exist, and a good example of smartwatch hacking pointed at accessibility and daily quality of life rather than novelty or fitness vanity metrics. Childs hasn’t open-sourced the project yet but has said he plans to.

Go See It

Andrew Childs wrote up the full build on his own site, and Hackaday covered the project.