Dana Lewis has Type 1 Diabetes, which she’s had to deal with since she was 14. In Type 1 Diabetes, the pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin – the hormone that makes glucose available to they body’s cells to use as fuel – or sometimes, the pancreas doesn’t work at all.
People like Dana have to monitor blood sugar levels very closely by wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) under the skin of their abdomen, or pricking a finger 12 times a day and measuring the glucose in the resulting blood droplet. The dose of insulin is then calculated to correspond with the diabetic person’s blood sugar levels. This process is uncomfortable and can be difficult under some circumstances: in particular, Dana found that the alarm on the CGM which she relied on was easy to sleep through at night. If a diabetic person doesn’t correct their levels the results can be very dangerous. So Dana and her fiancé (now husband) Scott Leibrand decided to start a project to make the alarm of CGM loud enough to wake her in the night. But feature creep’s a thing that happens to all of us, and they ended up doing what any right-thinking pair of computer scientists would do.
They built an artificial pancreas.
Leggi l’articolo completo: Artificial Raspberry Pi Pancreas
