41–50 of 172 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
10x ? 21 instead of .21 is 100x This is basically Russian roulette with insulin with even worse odds.
But does the device contain that much insulin?
The Omnipod 5 uses pods that the user fills with their insulin, the minimum fill amount is 85 units, the maximum is 200 units (i.e. 0.85ml minimum, up to 2mL of U100 insulin).
I know the department of defense used to use Ada because it was a “safety critical” language. I feel like when it comes to this devices there should be more stringent guidelines around coding practices. Is that not the case?
Why? Safety Critical Software engineers are expensive. If you write a webstack with Node.js and React to run the insulin pump you can hire web developers. They are much cheaper. And who would be able to tell the difference? Boomer lawyers and judges working on the lawsuit targeted against us won't understand.
A clearer description of the bug is here: https://twitter.com/Tims_Pants/status/1730515134731182490 It's wild that this sort of bug got through testing. As a diabetic it feels like our insulin pump software is very conservative and lacking in features especially compared to what some of the "closed loop" things would like to do. That seems reasonable if the manufacturers are having to do lots of safety testing. But i…
I know the department of defense used to use Ada because it was a “safety critical” language. I feel like when it comes to this devices there should be more stringent guidelines around coding practices. Is that not the case?
I can't comprehend how that kind of bug even happens. Not that insulin pumps should have any bugs, but it doesn't even sound like an integer overflow or use after free which is "understandable". Are they doing some kind of scuffed string parsing?
I know the department of defense used to use Ada because it was a “safety critical” language. I feel like when it comes to this devices there should be more stringent guidelines around coding practices. Is that not the case?
Why? Safety Critical Software engineers are expensive. If you write a webstack with Node.js and React to run the insulin pump you can hire web developers. They are much cheaper. And who would be able to tell the difference? Boomer lawyers and judges working on the lawsuit targeted against us won't understand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They probably wrote the controller in JavaScript
At my first job out of college, we were hired to create a point-of-sale system. We wrote it in Javascript, being unaware of how Javascript treats numbers. (Like a rented mule.) After the first few days, the client reached out and told us that the end-of-day numbers were sometimes off by a few cents - tax totals, things like that. After a few weeks, they'd be off by significantly more. Easily the most embarrassing inc…
I know the department of defense used to use Ada because it was a “safety critical” language. I feel like when it comes to this devices there should be more stringent guidelines around coding practices. Is that not the case?
There are: ISO 13485 and 62304. And different levels of design and testing for different classes of medical device. For example, I worked on a new ventilator at the start of the pandemic ( https://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/press-releases/building... ). As a medical device that was "in the loop" of keeping the patient alive, some of the strictest restrictions applied. There were 2 MCUs - one doing the control work,…
But I agree this is coming a bit late in the process if people have already been harmed.
I'm not familiar with insulin dosing, but I'm guessing a sharp 10x jump should warrant my app telling me to go to the hospital? I'd expect medical devices like this to have a last line of defence safety check against bugs. Basically checking all common sense edge cases like: is this dose lethal to humans, is this dose significantly more/less than historical doses, is this dose below a level in which most humans would…
In this case, the firmware was probably written by engineers who don't think about possible user errors, because they are focused on the hardware. Meanwhile, the app was probably outsourced to the lowest bidder from Elbonia.