Sulka writes, “Over the last two years, several people with type 1 diabetes have decided they’re not satisfied with the speed of development to technical solutions for managing diabetes. This has spawned several projects such as Nightscout, enabling cloud sharing of blood glucose data (especially crucial for parents with small children), and TidePool, which is working to better manage diabetes data in the cloud.”
In addition to these public projects, several developers have privately created their own artificial pancreas projects using Raspberry Pis and Android phones and interfacing these to proprietary medical equipment. Now, these developers turned researchers are taking the next step in opening (and speeding up) the development of the artificial pancreas system and are calling for help from additional developers:
The Open Artificial Pancreas System project (#OpenAPS and OpenAPS.org) is an open and transparent effort to make safe and effective basic Artificial Pancreas System (APS) technology widely available to more quickly improve and save as many lives as possible and reduce the burden of Type 1 diabetes. We believe that we can make safe and effective APS technology available more quickly, to more people, rather than just waiting for current APS efforts to complete clinical trials and be FDA-approved and commercialized through traditional processes. And in the process, we believe we can engage the untapped potential of dozens or possibly hundreds of patient innovators and independent researchers and also make APS technology available to hundreds or thousands of people willing to participate as subjects in clinical trials. At the end of the process, we hope to have produced an FDA-approved #OpenAPS reference design and reference implementation that can be used by any medical device manufacturer with minimal regulatory burden.
(Image: knitted pancreas, Erin Stevenson O’Connor, CC-BY-SA)