A DIY ‘bionic pancreas’ is changing diabetes care — what's next?
A DIY ‘bionic pancreas’ is changing diabetes care — what's next?
A community of people with type 1 diabetes got a self-built device approved. What can they offer that big companies can’t?
Hell of a world where people have to build their own open source systems for basic medical care, but I'm all for it. It'll help the technologically savvy, and then for-profit med companies will race to catch up to maintain their dominance and the less tech-savvy will also have the improvements they need.
Cory Doctorow argues that all implanted devices should be open sourced so that if the company making one ends support, patients aren’t left with a non- or malfunctioning piece of hardware inside them.
Related: https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
I can't imagine the pain of having your sight taken away, getting it partially back, and then having it taken away again purely by corporate greed.
Cory Doctorow laying down a banger again I see
If you haven't read his short stories I highly recommend them
I'm a type 1 diabetic, I've been using insulin pumps and CGM for over a decade. I am in no way defending pump manufacturers but A, this is not "basic medical care", pump/CGM systems (closed loop as they are called) capable of maintaining blood sugar levels are the latest and greatest tech for insulin dependent diabetics. B, it's not like they are creating something that doesn't already exist, they are just making open source alternatives, which I heartily support.
I just don't like how you are making it sound like "Welp the medical community doesn't want to make them so people had to step up and do it themselves!"
These things have been around a few years now and while I could fill a book with complaints about the design choices of the hardware we rely on I gotta say the algorithms that the software uses is very far down on the list of issues.
Apologies if I sounded flippant. The first part of the article made it sound to me like companies weren't developing this with any real urgency, hence why they had to do it themselves:
They knew that a fairly straightforward piece of software could make their lives much easier, but no companies were developing it quickly enough.
And I suppose what I meant by "basic medical care" is more that, at least to the extent I am aware of, the medical community is well-versed in how to manage the issue, and with the amount of people who suffer from T1 diabetes and the rapid rate of technological progression in society in general, these solutions should not only already be available but should be available to everyone, and shouldn't be as expensive to manage as it is. Near the end of the article is the comment:
A team at the University of Otago in New Zealand has run a successful early-stage clinical trial of an open-source insulin pump. The goal is to provide free-of-charge design plans to qualified manufacturers to build pumps for a fraction of the cost of current commercial ones.
I suppose it just upsets me in general that the goal of building low cost insulin pumps isn't a globally shared one across manufacturers.
Repo Men (2010)
My spouse is type 1 diabetic and I got her set up on Loop a few years ago.
It’s out of this world how much work she had to go through beforehand. Several times per day she had to babysit her shitty pancreas or she will literally die. Read a number from one device, apply some rough mental math, and insert a different number into a different device. I’m honestly confused it wasn’t automated sooner.
A mate of mine does this, and it has been amazing. All of his levels have been in the "zone" much more consistently.
Definitely something that should have been done a while ago
Please cyberize my pancreas
:_(
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