It’s a question we get asked often: What makes January AI different from Levels Health, and does January offer features Levels does not? While both January AI and Levels Health deliver a way to view your real-time blood glucose levels, the similarities effectively stop there. Below is a high-level overview of the primary differences between the two products — and keep reading as we delve deeper into exactly what this means and what you get (or don’t get) as a user, so you can choose the best Levels alternative. 

January AI vs Levels: at-a-glance

January vs Levels: the details

The primary difference between January and Levels lies in our name — “AI”. January is the only company in the space to use AI technology to create a ‘digital twin’ of yourself in order to accurately predict how your blood glucose will respond to foods before you even eat them. 

What’s more, January combines glucose tracking and prediction with industry-leading food logging (utilizing a database of 32M foods), so you can track your macros and calories to hit your goals. January combines this with activity and sleep tracking, so you get a holistic view of your total metabolic health.

This is unique to the January AI platform.

Head-to-head: AI

Virtual CGM

The AI is where January sets itself apart from the competition. Our Virtual CGM technology means you wear a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) just once to train our AI, and then you can remove the CGM and see your predicted glucose curve. This means you don’t need to buy expensive CGMs every 14 days, saving you thousands of dollars each year.

Continuous Glucose Prediction (CGP)

Additionally, thanks to our Continuous Glucose Prediction (CGP) technology, we project your predicted glucose curve two hours into the future, and enable you to look up the impact of foods on your glucose before you eat them — and compare the predicted curve with alternative foods so you can make smarter, more informed choices.

With January, you can test foods on your ‘digital twin’ to see how you’ll respond and choose the best option before eating, whereas with options like Levels, you have to use a trial and error approach – testing it on yourself and hope it doesn’t spike your blood sugar too much in the process.

Food Detect

Our Food Detect feature will sense when you’ve eaten (even if you haven’t logged your meal). This feature does require the user to wear a CGM, however.

Head-to-head: Nutritional intelligence

Unlike Levels, January also enables you to look up the nutritional value of foods by simply scanning the barcode or searching for it in our database of 32M foods. You can even find your favorite local restaurants and select meals from their menu, ensuring you track your calories and macros, avoid spiking foods, and make healthier choices. 

Our “Quick Add” food logging option allows you to even look up foods via speech. Just say “lobster ravioli”, for example, and we’ll log your meal for you. January AI has one of the most sophisticated food logging experiences on the market, whereas Levels does not use a standardized food database and doesn’t provide a user with even basic nutritional information.

Head-to-head: Activity insights

As mentioned earlier, January is far more than simply a glucose monitoring app. We provide insights into things like how long you should walk for after a meal to flatten your glucose curve.. We also connect to your Apple Health or Fitbit to provide activity tracking and heart rate data, so you can understand the impact activity has on your unique body.

Head-to-head: Recharge

January also has in-depth data to help you recharge, a key aspect of becoming metabolically healthy. Not only do we track sleep data, but we also track your Last Meal Sleep Gap (how long the gap is between your last meal and when you go to sleep — hint: it should be 3 hours or more). The January app also tracks how long you fast, providing guidelines you can monitor and optimize towards each and every day.

Head-to-head: Published science

And finally, January is backed by science and research. While Levels has no published research on its product, we have published numerous white papers around our AI and machine learning technology and are active in furthering the metabolic health space. This is something we’re proud of as a team and it clearly differentiates us from the competition. 

You can read some of our published research here:

• Virtual blood glucose monitoring and prediction using machine learning (2022)
• Machine learning-based digital health application integrating wearable data and behavioral patterns improves metabolic health (2022)
• Improvement in Glucose Regulation Using a Digital Tracker and Continuous Glucose Monitoring in Healthy Adults and Those with Type 2 Diabetes (2021)
• Heart Rate and CGM Feature Representation Diabetes Detection From Heart Rate: Learning Joint Features of Heart Rate and Continuous Glucose Monitors Yields Better Representations (2021)
• Machine-Learned Prediction of Glucose Response for 1000 Subjects (2020)

With January, you get a plethora of technology (and 1 CGM to train the AI) for just $288. This makes January not only the most advanced platform on the market, but also one of the most affordable too. And when you consider that with January you don’t need to buy costly CGMs every $14 days, the savings are huge over a given year. 

Our app is now in beta testing and you can sign up here. Experience the world’s first CGM for yourself — and welcome to a new you.