Abbott and Google Are Team Up to Help People Track Blood Sugar With AI

Abbott and Google announced a multi-year partnership on August 11, 2026. The goal is to connect Abbott's Lingo glucose monitor with Google Health so people can see their blood sugar data in the Google Health app and get AI-generated health tips through a feature called Google Health Coach (Engadget).

The Lingo is a small sensor you wear on your skin that reads your blood sugar levels continuously throughout the day and night. You do not need a prescription, and there are no finger pricks involved. Abbott launched it in the U.S. in September 2024 at $49 for two weeks of sensors and $89 for four weeks. It is designed for adults who do not use insulin — people who want to understand their body's blood sugar patterns for general wellness, not those managing insulin-dependent diabetes (Reuters). Abbott received FDA clearance for two over-the-counter glucose monitoring devices in June 2024. Lingo is aimed at health-curious consumers, while a companion device called Libre Rio is for adults with type 2 diabetes who do not need insulin (Reuters).

With this partnership, a Lingo user's blood sugar data flows into the Google Health app. From there, Google Health Coach — an artificial intelligence tool — can look at the data and suggest things like what to eat or how much to move (Engadget). Google's blog says the aim is to give people a fuller picture of their metabolic and women's health (Google blog).

Abbott and Google will also run one of the largest metabolic health studies ever conducted. It will combine blood sugar readings from Lingo sensors, data from fitness wearables, lab test results, and answers from health surveys — all analyzed together (Engadget).

Abbott has already been moving in this direction on its own. A feature called Libre Assist, inside Abbott's FreeStyle Libre app, lets users snap a photo of their meal and uses AI to predict how that food might affect their blood sugar before they eat it (Abbott). That tool came out before the Google deal but does something similar: turning raw blood sugar data into practical, real-time advice.

The two companies have worked together before. In Singapore, Abbott partnered with a company called Health2Sync through a Google chronic-disease program to build a 12-week digital health program that helped people manage blood sugar through lifestyle changes (Google blog). The new partnership takes that approach and scales it to a much wider audience.

About nine months before this announcement, in November 2025, Abbott issued a safety notice for some of its glucose monitors because they were giving faulty readings. The company told users of affected sensors to stop using them and rely on a standard blood sugar meter instead (Reuters). That notice applied to specific sensors, not the Lingo line as a whole. Still, it is a reminder that if an AI coach is going to base its advice on blood sugar readings, those readings had better be accurate.

There is a broader concern worth noting. Lingo is an over-the-counter product for people who do not use insulin, so it sits outside the stricter oversight that comes with prescription glucose monitors used by people who depend on insulin. The Google Health Coach tips are generated by AI, and the announcement does not explain how — or whether — those tips have been tested against real medical outcomes. Neither Abbott nor Google has said publicly how they validate that the AI's advice is actually safe and helpful.

The large study they are planning could help answer that question, but its details — how long it will run, what it will measure, and what counts as success — have not been shared yet. If the study is designed to measure real health results rather than just collect information, it could build the kind of evidence that AI-based glucose coaching currently lacks.

In concept, what this partnership enables is simple: you wear a Lingo sensor, see your blood sugar trends in the Google Health app, get AI suggestions about food and exercise, and contribute to a study that combines your data with thousands of others. Whether that whole loop actually leads to better health than wearing the sensor alone is the question that matters. Abbott brings decades of experience building glucose sensors. Google brings the computing power, AI models, and a consumer app platform. Neither company could build this kind of integrated system on its own.