i-SENS Brand Guidelines: CareSens Meters, the CareSens Air CGM and “Sensing Ahead”

Professors, students and a biosensor.

i-SENS was established in May 2000 in Nowon-gu, Seoul, according to the company’s own history; Korean Wikipedia gives the same founding date, 4 May 2000. The company says it was founded by professors and students from Kwangwoon University, in response to a government push to turn academic research into commercial products, and that it set up its research institute two months later, in July 2000.

Its first product reached the market three years on. In July 2003 i-SENS launched CareSens, a blood-glucose meter, in Korea; the company describes it as the first meter in the country to give a reading in five seconds from half a microlitre of blood. Exports began in 2004, the year the company says it gained CE marking and ISO 13485 certification, and in September 2004 it signed an agreement to supply test strips to AgaMatrix, a meter maker in the United States.

Manufacturing followed. The company lists a factory at Giheung completed in 2004, a plant at Wonju completed in June 2007, the year it launched CareSens N, and a factory at Songdo, in Incheon, completed in March 2012. i-SENS listed on the KOSDAQ market in January 2013, according to both its own history and Korean Wikipedia, and moved its headquarters to Seocho District in Seoul in 2014. A factory in China was completed in 2015, the company says.

From strips to a continuous sensor.

For its first two decades i-SENS was a meter-and-strip company that also made point-of-care analysers: its history lists electrolyte, blood-gas and HbA1c instruments alongside its glucose meters, and a veterinary electrolyte analyser launched in 2010. Much of its strip business has been made for other brands. Besides AgaMatrix, the company records a strip supply agreement with the Kyoto diagnostics maker ARKRAY in April 2010 and, a year later, the launch of a meter product for ARKRAY; it describes OEM and ODM partnerships as part of how it reached markets in more than 100 countries.

The move into continuous monitoring came in 2023. The Asia Business Daily reported on 21 June 2023 that Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety had approved CareSens Air, which i-SENS called the first continuous glucose monitor developed and produced in Korea; at the time, the paper noted, the monitors sold in Korea came from Abbott, Dexcom and Medtronic. The same paper reported the launch on 11 September 2023, with production at the Songdo plant from August and sales starting through the company’s online shop. The company says the sensor and transmitter form a single unit worn for up to 15 days, sending readings to a phone app.

Software partners arrived with it. The June 2023 report said Kakao Healthcare had signed a business agreement with i-SENS earlier that year and planned a digital health platform built around glucose readings from continuous monitors. i-SENS had also applied for CE marking in March 2023, the paper reported, aiming for a European launch in the first half of 2024; the company’s history says CareSens Air was introduced in Europe in 2024. Its overseas companies, the history adds, include i-SENS USA from 2010, units in China, India, Mexico and Chile from 2014 and 2015, and i-SENS GmbH and a Malaysian subsidiary from 2016.

Since then, according to its history, the company has added an upgraded CareSens Air for Korea and Europe in March 2025, a “My Health Phone” launched with Samsung in April 2025 and a separate CareSens Air receiver in November 2025. The meter brand remains in the range: the company says CareSens received the Korea Consumer Forum’s First Brand Award in the blood-glucose meter category in January 2026, for the 15th year running.

How diabetes device makers present themselves.

Diabetes device makers sell small things that people wear, carry or use many times a day: continuous glucose monitors worn on the upper arm or the belly, insulin pumps and tubeless patch pumps, blood-glucose meters with their test strips, and the pen needles and syringes used for injections. Their brand worlds are built around those objects, and increasingly around the data the objects produce.

A typical presentation pairs a close-up of a sensor or pump on skin with a phone screen showing a glucose graph and trend arrows. Apps and watch faces have become as central as the hardware: sensor makers describe readings sent wirelessly to phones, shared with family members and passed to insulin pumps, and that connection between devices is often the story the brand tells.

Photography in the category tends to be bright and active, with runners, swimmers, parents and children, while meter-and-strip brands lean on clean packshots of the meter, the strip pot and the lancing device. Regulation shapes the words as much as the pictures: product names come with indications, approval dates and age ranges, and marketing copy stays within what regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have cleared.

The industry meets at medical congresses such as the American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions, the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) and the ATTD conference on advanced technologies and treatments for diabetes, where new devices and study results are presented to clinicians. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its products are made and what regulators have said — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An “i” that doubles as an eye.

The company has grown partly by acquisition. Its history lists the purchase of the US coagulation-testing firm CoaguSense in November 2016. In May 2023 KED Global reported that i-SENS had announced a plan to buy all of AgaMatrix, its long-standing US strip customer, from AgaMatrix Holdings, with completion set for June; the chief executive, Nam Hak-hyun, called it the company’s second overseas acquisition after CoaguSense. The company’s own history dates the completed acquisition to July 2023. i-SENS said it would use AgaMatrix’s sales network in the United States and Europe for its meters and monitors. In September 2023 The Asia Business Daily named Nam Hak-hyun and Cha Geun-sik as co-chief executives.

i-SENS publishes its own account of its identity. Its “CI & Slogan” page says the logotype combines straight lines and curves to signal “technological prowess grounded in humanism,” and that the lower-case “i” stands for intelligent insight and for an “eye” on customers. It names two corporate colours, i-SENS Blue, for expertise and reliability, and i-SENS Green, for intelligence and sensibility; sets a clear-space rule around the wordmark; and pairs it with the slogan “Sensing Ahead, Caring More.” The company is based today in Seocho-gu, Seoul.

For a design guide, i-SENS shows how a maker of strips for other brands can build a consumer name of its own, with a described logotype, two named colours and a slogan. Compare ARKRAY, the Kyoto meter maker it has supplied, and Dexcom, a continuous-monitor maker. For this guide we use a deep blue and a clear green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep i-SENS’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.