Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
businessinsider.com
Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#2I've had type 1 diabetes since I was 10. With even a semi-automated solution we would greatly prevent the short and long term complications. The biggest issue is that brain runs on glucose. When we can't manage our levels, the brain shuts down. In order to prevent this we grow up paranoid, watching for every sign. Stress, faulty needles etc. all effect us.
Knowing that we can theoretically prevent nerve damage (almost every person with 10+ years diabetes gets it) and other serious conditions (kidney failure, blindness) and practically not being able to do anything is very depressing.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#3It amazes me that technology to do this isn't already mainstream and ubiquitous.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#4What makes it a "hacked" Raspberry Pi? Or is everything with a few cables soldered to it "hacked"?
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#5How much liability does a company open itself up to if they make their medical devices hackable? It's a travesty that these people had to rely on an unpatched vulnerability to make a device that would save people's lives.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#6I wonder why the medical industry doesn't do this, combining an insulin pump and a constant glucose monitor into a single system?
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#7It 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 effective entry are so high that only the big well funded companies can afford access - not really sure what you can do about that.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#8I 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.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#9I 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.
I'm sure this bias has a name? The idea that changing the outcomes for the better is actually worse because different people are affected. Or maybe because in one we are dying of a disease, and in the other one by software errors. Software errors should be avoidable, so they feel worse than disease somehow.
Re: Hacked Raspberry Pi turned into artificial pancreas
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm sure this bias has a name? The idea that changing the outcomes for the better is actually worse because different people are affected. Or maybe because in one we are dying of a disease, and in the other one by software errors. Software errors should be avoidable, so they feel worse than disease somehow.
Think about it this way. Imagine there's a hypothetical medical device X. It has been calculated, that due to operator errors, this machine on average kills 1/1000 patients. Operators are given more training,but the average does not change.
Now. Another company makes an automated machine, which kills 1/10000 patients on average, because of software errors. Do you think anyone would ever allow the second machine to be sold, even though it would save 9 persons compared to the manually operated machine? Of course not. If it ever came to light that it killed anyone due to a software error, it would be gone faster from the market than you can spell "liability". Does not matter that in fact it's killing less people on average than any other type of machine - it's just that in our minds software bugs are avoidable so therefore they are not acceptable at all.