Category Archives: artificial pancreas

Homebrew Pancreas Gets 30 Minutes of Fame

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It is pretty unusual to be reading Bloomberg Businessweek and see an article with the main picture featuring a purple PCB (the picture above, in fact). But that’s just what we saw this morning. The story is about an open source modification to an insulin pump known as the RileyLink. This takes advantage of older Medtronic brand insulin pumps and allows you to control the BLE device from a smartphone remotely and use more sophisticated software to control blood sugar levels.

Of course, the FDA isn’t involved. If they were, the electronics would cost $7,000 instead of $250 — although, …read more

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Woman Gets Diabetes, Builds Own Pancreas

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For the most part, when we break out the soldering iron to make a project for ourselves – we do so for fun. Sometimes we do so for necessity. Rarely do we, however, do so to save our own lives.  [Dana Lewis] is one of the 30 million people in the US who suffer from diabetes. It’s a condition where the pancreas fails to make insulin, resulting in a buildup of sugar in the bloodstream. Managing the levels of insulin and sugar in their bodies is a day-to-day struggle for the millions of diabetics in the world. It’s a great …read more

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Closing the Loop on an Artificial Pancreas

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Life as a parent is never easy, but when you’ve got a kid with Type 1 diabetes it’s a little harder. Sometimes it feels like a full-time job in itself; there’s never a break. With carb counts and insulin ratios that change throughout the day, every meal is a medical procedure. A romp in the snow or a long bike ride can send her blood glucose plummeting. The overnights are the worst, though, because you never know if you overestimated the number of carbs at dinner and gave her too much insulin. Low blood glucose is easily treated with a …read more

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