Tl;dr – I wrote a book about artificial pancreas systems / hybrid and fully closed loop systems / automated insulin delivery systems! It’s out today – you can buy a print copy on Amazon; a Kindle copy on Amazon; check out all the content on the web or your phone here; or download a PDF if you prefer.
A few months ago, I saw someone share a link to one of my old blog posts with someone else on Facebook. Quite old in fact – I had written it 5+ years ago! But the content was and is still relevant today.
It made me wonder – how could we as a diabetes community, who have been innovating and exploring new diabetes technology such as closed loop/artificial pancreas systems (APS), package up some of this knowledge and share it with people who are newer to APS? And while yes, much of this is tucked into the documentation for DIY closed loop systems, not everyone will choose a DIY closed loop system and also therefore may not see or find this information. And with regards to some of the things I’ve written here on DIYPS.org, not everyone will be lucky enough to have the right combination of search terms to end up on a particular post to answer their question.
Thus, the idea for a book was born. I wanted to take much of what I’ve been writing here, sharing on Facebook and Twitter, and seeing others discuss as well, and put it together in one place to be a good starting place for someone to learn about APS in general. My hope is that it’s more accessible for people who don’t know what “DIY” or “open source” diabetes is, and it’s findable by people who also don’t know or don’t consider themselves to be part of the “diabetes online community”.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not! But, like most of the things in the DIY community…the book is open source. Seriously. Here’s the repository on Github! If you see a typo or have suggestions of content to add, you can make a PR (pull request) or log an issue with content recommendations. (There’s instructions on the book page here with how to do either of those things!) I plan to make rolling updates to it, so you can see on the change log page what’s changed between major versions.)
It’s the first book out there that I know of on APS, but it won’t be the only one. I hope this inspires or moves more people to share their knowledge, through blogs or podcasts or future books, with the rest of our community and loved ones who want and need to learn more about managing type 1 diabetes.
“I will immediately recommend this book not just to people looking to use a DIY closed loop system, but also to anybody looking to improve their grasp on the management of type 1 diabetes, whether patient, caregiver, or healthcare provider.”
– Aaron Neinstein, MD
Endocrinologist, UCSF
And as always, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned about the self-publishing process, too. I previously used CreateSpace for my children’s books, which got merged with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and there was a learning curve for KDP for both doing the print version and doing the Kindle version. I didn’t get paid to write this book – and I didn’t write it for a profit. Like my children’s books, I plan to use any proceeds to donate copies to libraries and hospitals, and send any remaining funds to Life For A Child to help ensure as many kids as possible have access to insulin, BG monitoring supplies, and education.
I’m incredibly grateful for many people for helping out with and contributing to this book. You can see the full acknowledgement section with my immense thanks to the many reviewers of early versions of the book! And ditto for the people who shared their stories and experiences with APS. But special thanks go in particular to Scott for thorough first editing and overall support of every project I bring up out of the blue; to Tim Gunn for beautiful cover design of the book; and to Aaron Kowalski to be kind enough to write this amazing foreword.
