Artificial Pancreas News: DIYP, Bigfoot and Medtronic

#WeAreNotWaiting has become very well know in the diabetes data space. As I read about it, the next steps are slowly starting to come tantalizingly into view. Some even have hastags and Facebook pages. Others come from the usual suspects.

#DIYPS

Do It Yourself Pancreas System the fascinating collaboration of Dana Lewis & Scott Leibrand. A lovely couple if there ever was one. Their story is outlined at Median.com (1).  What is clear is their DIYPS is doable. Some folks wonder why hack your diabetes? Dana's 2¢ is, "I have to make about 300 decisions per day on average. It’s really fatiguing." Brilliantly understated Dana.

Having had the great pleasure of talking with them over the past year, doable was never in doubt.  It was more about about when. So my big question after reading the Median piece was simply, are they moving up the wedding date? Read it and see why.

Another piece that makes the connections from Nightscout to AP in Wired. (2) It goes from Nightscout to #DIYPS and then on to tease about Bigfoot.

There is a Bigfoot?

Bigfootbiomedical (3) is on Facebook where former JDRF leader Jeffrey Brewer is listed as CEO.  Some other very interesting folks, who are less public about it, are said to be working there as well. I trust they will confirm those rumors in their own good time. In the meanwhile Jeffery is playing a fun game of cat and mouse with Bigfoot on his Facebook timeline today.

Medtronic

It isn't only the home brew and startup crowd that are making strides. Medtronic has launched a next step with the MiniMed 640G (4). This new device shuts off insulin predictively. While that is an incremental step, it is a step. OK step / stride? You say potato..., it is somewhere in there. What is significant to me is progress. Medtronic will be sharing more about their next step their Hybrid Closed Loop system soon (do two steps make a stride?) It will be presented at the upcoming Advanced Technologies and Treatments for Diabetes (ATTD) 8th Annual Meeting being held at CNIT Paris La Defense from February 18-21, 2015 (5) At the last #MedtronicDAF, they said they were going to speed up bringing things to market. Seems they are. 

YDMV

All these are great news IMHO. Before somebody starts complaining about FDA, lets remember FDA approved the Medtronic 530G under their Artificial Pancreas guidance. Lots of folks complained that it wasn't an AP. OK you AP may vary - but FDA approved it as AP and that tells me they are looking to do just that. Well, OK. Also FDA flat to say they are looking to approve innovations under AP guidance. It may be a tad short of them saying, "Bring it on!" - So maybe the 530G is, as the saying goes, proof in the pudding.

To me this all matters because of Eggs and Baskets (6) in which I wrote:

I believe that better is better and perfect should not be the enemy of good. 

So I am all for advances in type 1 diabetes care that may fit into individual's life styles in a Your Diabetes May Vary kind of way. AP may work for some while GRI works better for others. I am fairly sure none of it will make diabetes care easy but it may be less hard and that's better.  

I support a diversified approach to making life better. There is a fable about putting eggs in more than one basket that explains modern portfolio theory better than most finance professors. 

YDMV, so should your AP options.



In case the links break:
(1) https://medium.com/access-matters/do-it-yourself-diabetes-bd1ea1adf034
(2) http://www.wired.com/2014/12/diabetes-patients-hacking-together-diy-bionic-pancreases/
(3) https://www.facebook.com/bigfootbiomed
(4) https://www.medtronic-diabetes.com.au/insulin-pumps/640g
(5) http://newsroom.medtronic.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251324&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2017567
(6) http://www.ydmv.net/2011/10/artificial-pancreas-and-egg-baskets.html

Join the Brainstorm Started at #MedtronicDAF

A lot of wonderful and wise things happened at the Medtronic Diabetes Advocate Forum.*

Please help extend an important part of the event beyond the walls of Medtronic and beyond the borders of the USA. At #MedtronicDAF, with Scott Johnson and George Simmons, I helped lead some structured brainstorming. It would be easy enough to report out the results. That could, however, be seen as suggesting the views collected there are the only views on the topics that matter. 

We all know that ain't even close. How about sharing your thoughts?

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

For actual reports on the event see:
Kim Vlasnik at Texting My Pancreas
Catherine Price at A Sweet Life
Kerri Sparling at Six Until Me
Christel Aprigliano at The Perfect D
Sara Nicastro at Moments of Wonderful
Meri Schuhmacher at Our Diabetes Life
Jacquie at Typical type 1
Cara Richards at Every Day, Every hour, Every Minute
Chris Stocker at The Life of a Diabetic
Jessica Collins at Me and D
George Simmons at Ninjabetic


*Disclaimer: I attended as a guest of Medtronic. They paid for jet lag, oceans of caffein, a few beers, a place to stay and local transportation that made me car sick. They did not ask me to write. Nor suggest any topics if I did. They did not ask me to hold back on questions and they didn't hold back on replies to tough questions. My T1D kids are not users of their devices, we have demo-ed some, that did not seem to influence their interest in my thoughts. I try to maintain a friendly relationship with the people there. I feel their primary motivation is to serve people with diabetes through their work. This includes their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, of which I am not one. For the new proposed guidance: Medtronic has no collaboration, editorial preview or review privilege on anything I say here. And a partridge in a pear tree.