What makes it a "hacked" Raspberry Pi? Or is everything with a few cables soldered to it "hacked"?
Hacking as a term doesn't mean much anymore beyond a weak social identifier. The startup scene calls marketing "growth hacking" these days ffs.
Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
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Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#12It amazes me that technology to do this isn't already mainstream and ubiquitous.
It doesn't amaze me, the FDA and organisations like it are brilliant (without them the world would be a worse place) but they do put a retard on a lot of the cool stuff by demanding exhaustive testing (which in fairness I can't disagree with, medical stuff isn't a website where you can just patch it later - people will die). It's not a perfect system though as substandard stuff does get through and the barriers to ef…
I think you're supposed to call them mentally handicapped.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#13Calling a glucose monitoring system with an insulin pump an artificial pancreas is a bit misleading, considering all the other functions the pancreas has.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#14Calling a glucose monitoring system with an insulin pump an artificial pancreas is a bit misleading, considering all the other functions the pancreas has.
What are the other functions?
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#15I wonder why the medical industry doesn't do this, combining an insulin pump and a constant glucose monitor into a single system?
Liability. Clinical decisions are made by humans. Sad thing is, although the software controlling this would undoubtedly have lots of flaws and cause suffering and death, not implementing something also allows people to suffer and die.
> Liability. Clinical decisions are made by humans.
Pacemakers have a high risk, yet here we have an automated solution. I think liability alone cannot be the root cause.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#16I wonder why the medical industry doesn't do this, combining an insulin pump and a constant glucose monitor into a single system?
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Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#17This article leaves us hanging; the initial motivator for developing the system is to prevent instances of overnight hypoglycemia - but we reach a conclusion talking about how it can autonomously deliver insulin to correct for hyperglycemic events. Were they ever able to make the algorithm robust enough to predict low blood sugars in the future and "shut off" or reduce delivery of basal insulin to mitigate these events?
New pumps by Medtronic are equipped with an auto-off feature that suspends insulin delivery if the user's blood sugar is below a certain threshold [1], however this is a rear-facing indicator and the patient will still experience a hypoglycemic event.
I assume the next logical steps towards making these systems fully autonomous is to remove the idealogical separation of basal and bolus insulin; instead, the system would register increases and decreases of blood sugar and take systematic steps towards bringing them back into a healthy range - much like a healthy pancreas does, either by increasing or decreasing the amount of insulin being delivered at a given time. That way a patient can eat, exercise, and live a "normal" lifestyle while the pump takes care of delivering the correct amount of insulin.
[1] http://www.medtronicdiabetes.com/products/minimed-530g-diabe...
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#18While I am a big fan of DIY bio, my experience with Raspberry Pis is that they are highly prone to failure. Becoming dependent on a device- that is, expecting it to work with close to 100% reliability- and then using a device that is easy to disable and prone to failure (I run a fleet of Pis and they mangle their SD cards a lot)- seems like wishful thinking.
It may work 95% of the time, but that's not good enough. There's a reason really good medical devices are based on simpler platforms that are more robust.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#19While I am a big fan of DIY bio, my experience with Raspberry Pis is that they are highly prone to failure. Becoming dependent on a device- that is, expecting it to work with close to 100% reliability- and then using a device that is easy to disable and prone to failure (I run a fleet of Pis and they mangle their SD cards a lot)- seems like wishful thinking. It may work 95% of the time, but that's not good enough. Th…
I agree, this is a job more suited to a simple 8 or 16-bit micro without any OS.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#20Calling a glucose monitoring system with an insulin pump an artificial pancreas is a bit misleading, considering all the other functions the pancreas has.
What are the other functions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreas#Function
"It is possible for one to live without a pancreas, provided that the person takes insulin for proper regulation of blood glucose concentration and pancreatic enzyme supplements to aid digestion."