CGM

Autosensitivity (automatically adjusting insulin sensitivity factor for insulin dosing with #OpenAPS)

by Dana Lewis

There’s a secret behind why #OpenAPS was able to deal so well with my BGs during norovirus. Namely, “autosensitivity”.

Autosensitivity (or “autosens”, for short hand) is an advanced feature that can optionally be enabled in OpenAPS.

We know how hard it is for a PWD (person with diabetes) to pay attention to all the numbers and all the things and realize when something is “off”. This could be a bad pump site, a pump site going bad, hormones from growth, hormones from menstrual cycles, sensitivity from exercise the day before, etc. So at the beginning of the year, Scott and I started brainstorming with the community about automatically detecting when the PWD is more or less sensitive to insulin than normal, and adjusting accordingly. Building on the success we’d had in DIYPS with fixed “sensitivity” and “resistance” modes, we built the feature to assess how sensitive or resistant the body is (compared to normal), rather than just a binary mode that sets a predefined response.

How OpenAPS calculates autosensitivity/how it works

It looks at each BG data point for the last 24 hours and calculates the delta (actual observed change) over the last 5 minutes. It then compares it to “BGI” (blood glucose impact, which is how much BG *should* be dropping from insulin alone), and assesses the “deviations” (differences between the delta and BGI).

When sensitivity is normal and basals are well tuned, we expect somewhere between 45-50% of non-meal deviations to be negative, and the remaining 50-55% of deviations should be positive. (To exclude meal-related deviations, we exclude overly large deviations from the sample.) So if you’re outside of that range, you are probably running sensitive or resistant, and we want to adjust accordingly. The output of the detect-sensitivity code is a single ratio number, which is then used to adjust both the baseline basal rate as well as the insulin sensitivity factor (and, optionally, BG targets).

Autosens is designed to detect to food-free downward drift, due to basal rates being too high for the current state of the body, and will adjust basals downward to compensate. The other meal-assist related portion of the algorithms do a pretty good job of dealing with larger than expected post-meal spikes due to resistance: auto-sensitivity mostly comes into play for resistance when you’re sick or otherwise riding high even without food.

Does this calculate basals?

No. Similar to everything else in OpenAPS, this works from your established basals – meaning the baseline basal rates in your pump are what the sensitivity calculations are adjusting from. If you run a marathon and your sensitivity is normally 40, it might adjust your sensitivity to 60 (meaning 1u of insulin would drop your BG an expected 60mg/dl instead of 40 mg/dl) and temporarily adjust your baseline basal rate of 1u to .6u/hour, for example.

This algorithm is simply saying “there’s something going on, let’s adjust proportionately to deal with the lower-than-usual or higher-than-usual sensitivity, regardless of cause”. It easily detects “your basals are too high and/or your ISF is too low” or “your basals are too low and/or your ISF is too high”, but actually differentiating between the effect of basal and ISF is a bit more difficult to do with a simple algorithm like this, so we’re working on a number of new algorithms and tools (see “oref0 issue 99” for our brainstorming on basal tuning and the subsequent issues linked from there) to tackle this in the future.

#OpenAPS’s autosensitivity adjustments during norovirus

After I got over the worst of the norovirus, I started looking at what OpenAPS was calculating for my sensitivity during this time. I was especially curious what would happen during the 2-3 days when I was eating very little.

My normal ISF is 40, but OpenAPS gradually calculated the shift in my sensitivity all the way to 50. That’s really sensitive, and in fact I don’t remember ever seeing a sensitivity adjustment that dramatic – but makes sense given that I usually don’t go so long without eating. (Usually when I notice I’m a little sensitive, I’ll check and see that autosens has been adjusting based on an estimated 43 or so sensitivity.)

And in later days, as expected when sick, I shifted to being more resistant. So autosens continued to assess the data and began adjusting to an estimated sensitivity of 38 as my body continued fighting the virus.

—

It is so nice to have the tools to automatically make these assessments and adjustments, rather than having to manually deal with them on top of being sick!

 

Half life

by Dana Lewis

I have now lived with diabetes for more than half of my life.

That also means I have now lived less than half of my life without diabetes.

This somehow makes the passing of another year living with diabetes seem much more impactful to me. Maybe not to you, or to someone else with a different experience of living with diabetes and a different timeline of life before and after diagnosis…but to me this is a big one.

I’m happy to have context, though, to help me keep things in perspective. For example, I’ve now lived with a closed loop artificial pancreas (or automated insulin delivery) system for almost two full years.

(That’s almost as significant a marker of a “with” vs. “without” comparison as living “with” vs. “without” diabetes.)

And because I ended up with type 1 diabetes, I found out that doing things for other people and the communities you’re a part of is a powerful way to help yourself, both in the short term and the long term. That’s what drove me to figure out a way to take #DIYPS closed loop and make it something open source. And by doing that, I learned so much more about open source, and have been able to partner with incredible people innovating in hardware and software. These collaborations have resulted in an incredibly rich community of passionate people I like to call #OpenAPS-ers.

While #OpenAPS is by no means a cure, and no artificial pancreas will be a cure, they provide an immeasurably improved quality of life that a lot of us didn’t realize was possible with diabetes. Someone told me he can get the same results for his child living with diabetes, but with #OpenAPS it requires about 85% less work. And given the enormous time and cognitive burden of diabetes, this is a HUGE reduction.

And now doors are opening for us collectively to make even more of a significant impact on the diabetes community, and our fellow patient communities. Yesterday, while at the White House Frontiers conference, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins was in the audience during my panel. At the end of the day, he stopped me to ask questions about my experiences and perspective on the FDA and what we need from the government. I was able to talk with him about the need for FDA & other parts of the government to help foster and support open source innovation. We talked about the importance of data access for patients, and the need for data visibility on commercially approved medical devices.

Showing former NIH Director Francis Collins my OpenAPS rig and talking about data interoperability.

This is not just a need of people with diabetes (although it’s certainly very applicable for all of the manufacturers with pipelines full of artificial pancreas products): these are universal needs of people dealing with serious health conditions.

Given what I heard yesterday, it’s working. The #WeAreNotWaiting spirit is infusing our partners in these other areas. We are planting seeds, building relationships, and working in collaboration with those at the FDA, NIH, HHS in addition to those in industry and academia. I know they were working toward these same goals before, but social media has helped raise up our collective voices about the burning need to make things better, sooner, for more people.

So if I have to live the rest of my life at a ratio where more than half of it has been spent living with diabetes, I look forward to continuing to work to get to an 85% reduction in the burden of daily life with diabetes for everyone.

 

What a FDA approved commercial hybrid closed loop artificial pancreas system (670G) means for #OpenAPS

by Dana Lewis

You probably heard that a commercial hybrid closed loop (the 670G) has been approved by the U.S. FDA and, like everyone else, are wondering what that means for #OpenAPS.

First commercial AID finally became available in 2016

First, here’s our initial reaction:

Thoughts-on-commercial-AID-DanaMLewis

And here are some longer form thoughts:

  • Yes, this is exciting. FDA moved months more quickly then expected (hmm, we are sensing a theme when the #WeAreNotWaiting community is involved ;)) to get this tech approved. And as we’ve experienced (check out this self-reported outcomes study with better outcomes than the pivotal trial for this new device), the results of using a hybrid closed loop are outstanding. It’s disappointing that they won’t be ready to ship until Spring 2017, but…
  • …This means the company has time to work on user guides and usability. As we’ve told every device company we’ve encountered, we (the #OpenAPS community) are happy to share everything we’ve learned. And we have learned a lot, including what it takes to trust a system, how much info is needed to help determine if additional human action is needed, what to do in all kinds of real-world situations, and more. We hope the companies continue to work with people with diabetes who have experience with this technology from both clinical trials and the DIY world, where we’ve racked up 350,000+ hours with this type of technology. Because setting expectations with users for this technology will be key for successful and sustained adoption.

This doesn’t really mean anything for #OpenAPS, though. The first generation of AP technology is similar to #OpenAPS in that it’s a hybrid closed loop that still requires the human to input carbs into the system, but it unfortunately has a set point that can not be adjusted below 120mg/dl.  For many people, this is not a big deal. But for others, this will be a deal breaker. For DIYers, that lack of customization will likely be frustrating. And for many families, the lack of remote data visualization may be another deal breaker. And, like with all new technology and devices, getting this stuff covered by insurance may be an uphill battle. So while optimistically this enables many people in the U.S. to finally access this technology (yay) without having to DIY, it won’t necessarily be truly available to everyone from a cost or access perspective for many years to come. So #OpenAPS and other DIY technology may still be needed from a cost/access perspective to continue to help fill gaps compared to current status quo with basic, non-connected diabetes devices (i.e. standalone pump and CGMs).

I also know that many of the parents of kids with T1D are disappointed, because the initial approval is for kids 14+, and it even notes that the system is not recommended for kids <7 or those taking less than 8u of insulin every day (usually young kids). I asked, suspecting it was related to occlusion, but it sounds more like they just don’t have enough data to say for sure that the system is safe with that small amount of insulin, and they’re working on additional studies to get data in that area.

Ditto, too, for more studies allowing different set points. They stuck with a 120mg/dl set point in order to speed to approval, but fingers crossed they get other studies done and new approvals from FDA before this device ships in the spring – that would be awesome. And I was glad to hear that they do have an “exercise” target of 150. That’s a bit of good…but I’m still hesitant that it is enough. From my personal experience knowing net IOB (here’s why net IOB matters) an hour before and when starting exercise is required information to help me decided whether or not I will need carbs to prevent lows during exercise. I don’t think this device will report on net IOB, but I admittedly haven’t seen the device and hopefully I’ll be proved wrong and the data available will be good enough for this purpose!

So in summary: this is good news. But we still need more FDA approved commercial options, and even with a single “commercial approved option”, it’s still ~6+ months away from reaching the hands of people with diabetes…so we as a #WeAreNotWaiting movement continue to have work to do to help speed up the processes for getting enhanced diabetes technology approved and available on the market, with access to view data the ways we need it.

—

*(Yes, in the title of the post I called it a commercial hybrid closed loop artificial pancreas system. It’s a hybrid closed loop, as is #OpenAPS, but it’s also on the road/part of the suite of more complex artificial pancreas technology. I realize to many PWDs “artificial pancreas” means a lot of different things. Quite certainly, regardless of definition, an artificial pancreas or hybrid closed loop still requires a lot of work. It’s not a cure by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s easy for the media to describe it as an AP, and I also find it a lot easier to describe the small device accompanying my pump when strangers ask as an “artificial pancreas” followed by an explanation rather than saying “hybrid closed loop”.

If anything, I think having the media broadly categorize it as an AP will encourage the diabetes community to ask more questions about what exactly this tech does, leading to greater understanding and better expectations about what the device will/won’t be able to do. So this may result in a good thing.)

Our take on how to DIY closed loop, safely

by Dana Lewis
You will often see similar growth and evolution cycles across any type of online community, and the closed loop community is following this growth cycle as expected. Much like how Nightscout went from one very hard way to setup to get your CGM data in the cloud, to ultimately having dozens of DIY options and now more recently, multiple commercial options, closed looping is following similar trends. OpenAPS was the first open source option for people who wanted to DIY loop, and now there are a growing number of ways to build or run closed loops! And next year, there should be at least one commercial option publicly available in the U.S. followed by several more options in 2018 on the commercial market. Awesome! This is exactly the progress we were hoping to see, and facilitate happening more quickly, by making our work & encouraging others to make their work open source.

We’ve learned a lot (from building our own closed loop and watching others do so through OpenAPS) that we think is relevant to anyone who pursues DIY closed looping, regardless of the technology option they choose. This thought process and approach will likely also be relevant to those who switch to a closed loop commercial option in the future, so we wanted to document some of the thought process that may be involved.

Approaching closed looping safely

Before considering closed looping, people should know:

  • A (hybrid or even full) closed loop is not a cure. There will be a learning curve, much like switching to a pump for the first time.
  • Even after you get comfortable with a closed loop, there will still sometimes be high or low BGs, because we are still dealing with insulin that peaks in 60-90 minutes; we’ll still get kinked pump sites or pooled insulin; and we’ll still have hormones that drive our BGs up and down very rapidly in ways we can’t predict, but must react to. Closed looping helps a lot, but there’s still a lot that goes into managing diabetes.

Before using a DIY closed loop, people should consider:

  • Identifying or creating the method to visualize their data in a way they are comfortable with, both for real-time monitoring of loop activity and retrospective monitoring. This is a key component of DIY looping.
  • Running in “open loop” mode, where the system provides recommendations and you spend days or weeks analyzing and comparing those recommendations to how you would calculate and choose to take action manually.
  • Based on watching the “open loop” suggestions, decide your safety limits: you should set max basal and bolus rates, as well as max net IOB limits where relevant. Start conservative, knowing you can change them over time as you watch and validate how a particular DIY loop works with your body and your lifestyle.

Getting started with a DIY closed loop, people should think about the following:

  • Understand how it works, so you know how to fix it. Remember, by pursuing a DIY closed loop, you are responsible for it and the operation of it. No one is forcing you to do this; it’s one of many choices you can and will make with regards to how you personally choose to manage your diabetes.
  • But even more importantly, you need to understand how it works so you can choose if you need to step in and take manual action. You should understand how it works so you can validate “this is what it should be doing” and “I am getting the output and outcomes that I would expect if I were doing this decision making manually”.
  • Often, people will get frustrated by diabetes and take actions that the loop then has to compensate for. Or they’ll get lax on when they meal bolus, or not enter carbs into the system, etc. You will get much better results by putting better data into the system, and also by having a better understanding of insulin timing in your body, especially at meal times. Using techniques like “eating soon mode” will dramatically help anyone, with or without a closed loop, reduce and limit severity of meal spikes. Ditto goes for having good CGM “calibration hygiene” (h/t to Pete for this phrase) and ensuring you have thought about the ramifications of automating insulin dosing based on CGM data, and how you may or may not want to loop if you doubt your CGM data. (Like “eating soon”, ‘soaking’ a CGM sensor may yield you better first day results.)
  • Start with higher targets for the loop than you might correct to manually.
  • Move first from an “open loop” mode to a “low glucose suspend” type mode first, where max net IOB is 0 and/or max basal is set at or just above your max daily scheduled basal, so it low temps to prevent and limit lows, but does not high temp above bringing net IOB back to 0.
  • Gradually increase max net IOB above 0 (and/or increase max basal) every few days after several days without low BGs; similarly, adjust targets down 10 points for every few days gone without experiencing low BGs.
  • Test basic algorithms and adjust targets and various max rates before moving on to testing advanced features. (It will be a lot easier to troubleshoot, and learn how a new feature works, if you’re not also adjusting to closed looping in its entirety).
This is our (Dana & Scott‘s) take on things to think about before and when pursuing a closed loop option. But there’s about a hundred others running around the world with closed loops, too, so if you have input to share with people that they should consider before looping, leave a comment below! :) And if you’re looking to DIY closed loop before a commercial solution is available, you might also be interested in checking out the OpenAPS Reference Design and some FAQs related to OpenAPS.

OpenAPS poster cited in Nature!

by Dana Lewis

I was thrilled to read a commentary by John Wilbanks and Eric Topol, out in Nature today, titled “Stop the privatization of health data“. (Click here to read a PDF version of the article.)

Tucked on the bottom of the second page of the (PDF version of the) article:

“For instance, in 2014, a woman with type 1 diabetes wired together a tiny processor, an insulin pump and a continuous glucose monitor to automate the regulation of her blood sugar levels. For a small community of patients, the collective use of such ‘home-made’ systems has resulted in improvements that are well ahead of those provided by devices and interventions emerging from conventional markets.1”

(The citation is to the poster that we presented on behalf of the #OpenAPS community at the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions meeting last month, with self-reported outcomes from 18 of the first 40 users and builders of DIY artificial pancreas systems)

OpenAPS (n=1)*98 as of July 19, 2016It’s worth noting that there are now (n=1)*98 users of #OpenAPS, so this “small community” is growing fast: doubling approximately every three months.

Wilbanks and Topol highlight some critical truths in their commentary, and call out another (frustrating) diabetes example to illustrate:

“Although patients can monitor their glucose levels at any instant, their aggregate records are not made accessible to them. And there is no mechanism by which patients or researchers outside the company can gain access to Medtronic’s tens of thousands of measurements.”

I’ve written about this specific example before, in fact: new ‘partnerships’ mean my personal health data is likely shared with IBM for Watson’s usage…but I don’t have access to this data or insights, and am in fact missing critical information and data visualization on my FDA-approved medical device that’s been on the market for years.

The call to action for device manufacturers, regulators, and the medical industry is simple: Give me, the patient, my data that I need so I can safely take care of myself and better manage my diabetes.

Wilbanks and Topol emphasize that this won’t happen “…unless each of us takes responsibility for our own health and disease, and for the information that we can generate about ourselves. When it comes to control over our own data, health data must be where we draw the line.”

This needs to happen everywhere, not just in diabetes. Will you join us in drawing the line?

How to “soak” a new CGM sensor for better first day BGs

by Dana Lewis

Having used a CGM for years (and years and years, and years before that), and having chosen to build a DIY system that provides smart alerts and recommendations based on said CGM data (learn more about my #DIYPS system here) and ultimately using CGM data to build the open source closed loop system that automates insulin delivery (find out more about #OpenAPS here)…I’ve learned a few things about how to get the best data out of my sensors. Currently, I’m using Dexcom, so this applies to the Dexcom sensors.

The biggest thing I do to get better first day results from a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) sensor is to “soak” my sensors. Here’s what I mean by this:

Normally, you’d expect to see a person with one CGM sensor on their body, like this:

Dana Lewis_first day CGM sensor illustrationHowever, 12-24 hours before I expect my sensor to end, I insert my next sensor into my body. To protect the sensor (you don’t want the sensor filament itself to get torn off or lost in your body), I plop an old (“dead” battery) transmitter on it.

If you don’t have an old/dead transmitter, you could try taping over it – the goal is just to protect the sensor filament from ripping.

Dana Lewis_last day CGM sensor soak illustrationThe next day, when my sensor session ends:

  • I take the “live” transmitter off the old sensor, and remove the old sensor from my body. I hit “stop sensor” on my receiver, if it hasn’t already stopped itself.
  • I gently remove the “dead”/old transmitter from ‘new’ sensor.
  • I then stick the “live” transmitter onto the new sensor.
  • I hit “start sensor” on my receiver.

Dana Lewis_last day CGM sensor soak change illustrationThe outcome (for me) has always been significantly improved “first day” BG readings from the sensor. This works great when you can plan ahead and your outfits (don’t judge, sometimes you have important outfits like a wedding dress to plan around) and skin real estate support two sites on your body for 24 hours or so. This doesn’t work if you rip a sensor out by accident, so in those scenarios I go ahead and put a new sensor on, put the ‘live’ transmitter on, and hit ‘start’ to get through the 2 hour calibration period as soon as possible to get back to having live data. (All the while knowing that the first day is going to be more “meh” than it would be otherwise.)

What we heard and saw at #DData16 and #2016ADA

by Dana Lewis

As mentioned in the previous post, we had the privilege of coming to New Orleans this past weekend for two events – #DData16 and the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions (#2016ADA). A few things stuck out, which I wanted to highlight here.

At #DData16:

  • The focus was on artificial pancreas, and there was a great panel moderated by Howard Look with several of the AP makers. I was struck by how many of them referenced or made mention of #OpenAPS or the DIY/#WeAreNotWaiting movement, and the need for industry to collaborate with the DIY community (yes).
  • I was also floored when someone from Dexcom referenced having read one of my older blog posts that mentioned a question of why ??? was displayed to me instead of the information about what was actually going on with my sensor. It was a great reminder to me of how important it is for us to speak up and keep sharing our experiences and help device manufacturers know what we need for current and future products, the ones we use every day to help keep us alive.
  • Mark Wilson gave a PHENOMENAL presentation, using a great analogy about driving and accessing the dashboard to help people understand why people with diabetes might choose to DIY. He also talked about his experiences with #OpenAPS, and I highly recommend watching it. (Kudos to Wes for livestreaming it and making it broadly available to all – watch it here!) I’ve mentioned Mark & his DIY-ing here before, especially because one of his creations (the Urchin watchface) is one of my favorite ways to help me view my data, my way.
  • Howard DM’ed me in the middle of the day to ask if I minded going up as part of the patient panel of people with AP experiences. I wasn’t sure what the topic was, but the questions allowed us to talk about our experiences with AP (and in my case, I’ve been using a hybrid closed loop for something like 557 or so days at this point). I made several points about the need for a “plug n play” system, with modularity so I can choose the best pump, sensor, and algorithm for me – which may or may not be made all by the same company. (This is also FDA’s vision for the future, and Dr. Courtney Lias both gave a good presentation on this topic and was engaged in the event’s conversation all day!).

At #2016ADA:

  • There needs to be a patient research access program developed (not just by the American Diabetes Association for their future Scientific Sessions meetings, but at all scientific and academic conferences). Technology has enabled patients to make significant contributions to the medical and scientific fields, and cost and access are huge barriers to preventing this knowledge from scaling. At #2016ADA, “patient” is not even an option on the back of the registration form. Scott and I are privileged that we could potentially pay for this, but we don’t think we should have to pay ($410 for a day pass or $900 for a weekend pass) so much when we are not backed by industry or an academic organization of any sort. (As a side note, a big thank you to the many people who have a) engaged in discussion around this topic b) helped reach out to contacts at ADA to discuss this topic and c) asked about ways to contribute to the cost of us presenting this research this weekend.)
  • We presented research from 18 of the first 40 users of #OpenAPS. You can find the FULL CONTENT of our findings and the research poster content in this post on OpenAPS.org. We specifically posted our content online (and tweeted it out – see this thread) for a few reasons:
    • First, everything about #OpenAPS is open source. The content of our poster or any presentation is similarly open source.
    • Not everyone had time to come by the poster.
    • Not everyone has the privilege or funds to attend #2016ADA, and there’s no reason not to share this content online, especially when we will likely get more knowledge sharing as a result of doing so.
  • With the above in mind, we encouraged people stopping by to take whatever photos of our poster that they wanted, and told them about the content being posted online. (And in fact, in addition to the blog post about the poster, that information is now on the “Outcomes” page on OpenAPS.org.)
  • Frustratingly, some people were asked to take down posted photos of our poster. If anyone received such a note, please feel free to pass on my tweet that you have authorization by the authors to have taken/used the photo. This is another area (like the need to develop patient research access programs) that needs to be figured out by scientific/academic conferences – presenters/authors should be able to specifically allow sharing and dissemination of information that they are presenting.
  • Speaking of photos, I was surprised that around half a dozen clinicians (HCPs) stopped by and made mention of having used the picture of the #OpenAPS rig and the story of #OpenAPS in one of their presentations! I am thrilled this story is spreading, and being spread even by people we haven’t had direct contact with previously! (Feel free to use this photo in presentations, too, although I’d love to hear about your presentation and see a copy of it!)
  • We had many amazing conversations during the poster session on Sunday. It was scheduled for two hours (12-2pm), but we ended up being there around four hours and had hundreds of fantastic dialogues. Here were some of the most common themes of conversation:
    • Why are patients doing this?
      • Here’s my why: I originally needed louder alarms, built a smart alarm system that had predictive alerts and turned into an open loop system, and ultimately realized I could close the loop.
    • What can we learn from the people who are DIY-ing?
    • How can we further study the DIY closed loop community?
      • This is my second favorite topic, which touches on a few things – 1) the plan to do a follow up study of the larger cohort (since we now have (n=1)*84 loopers) with a full retrospective analysis of the data rather than just self-reported outcomes, as this study used; 2) ideas around doing a comparison study between one or more of the #OpenAPS algorithms and some of the commercial or academic algorithms; 3) ideas to use some of the #OpenAPS-developed tools (like a basal tuning tool that we are planning to build) in a clinical trial to help HCPs help patients adjust more quickly and easily to pump therapy.
    • What other pumps will work with this? How can there be more access to this type of DIY technology?
      • We utilize older pumps that allow us to send temp basal commands; we would love to use a more modern pump that’s able to be purchased on the market today, and had several conversations with device manufacturers about how that might be possible;  we’ll continue to have these conversations until it becomes a reality.
  • There is some great coverage coming of the poster & the #OpenAPS community, and I’ll post links here as I see them come out. For starters, Dave deBronkart did a 22 minute interview with Scott & I, which you can see here. DiabetesMine also included mention of the #OpenAPS poster in their conference roundup. And diaTribe wrote up the the poster as a “new now next”! Plus, WebMD wrote an article on #OpenAPS and the poster as well.
A picture of our #ADA2016 poster in the exhibit hall

Scott and I walked away from this weekend with energy for new collaborations (and new contacts for clinical trial and retrospective analysis partnerships) and several ideas for the next phase of studies that we want to plan in partnership with the #OpenAPS community. (We were blown away to discover that OpenAPS advanced meal assist algorithm is considered by some experts to be one of the most advanced and aggressive algorithms in existence for managing post-meal BG, and may be more advanced than anything that has yet been tested in clinical trials.) Stay tuned for more!

Research studies and usability thoughts

by Dana Lewis
It’s been a busy couple (ok, more than couple) of months since we last blogged here related to developments from #DIYPS and #OpenAPS. (For context, #DIYPS is Dana’s personal system that started as a louder alarms system and evolved into an open loop and then closed loop (background here). #OpenAPS is the open source reference design that enables anyone to build their own DIY closed loop artificial pancreas. See www.OpenAPS.org for more about that specifically.)

We’ve instead spent time spreading the word about OpenAPS in other channels (in the Wall Street Journal; on WNYC’s Only Human podcast; in a keynote at OSCON, and many other places like at the White House), further developing OpenAPS algorithms (incorporating “eating soon mode” and temporary targets in addition to building in auto-sensitivity and meal assist features), working our day jobs, traveling, and more of all of the above.

Some of the biggest improvements we’ve made to OpenAPS recently have been usability improvements. In February, someone kindly did the soldering of an Edison/Rileylink “rig” for me. This was just after I did a livestream Q&A with the TuDiabetes community, saying that I didn’t mind the size of my Raspberry Pi rig. I don’t. It works, it’s an artificial pancreas, the size doesn’t matter.

That being said… Wow! Having a small rig that clips to my pocket does wonders for being able to just run out the door and go to dinner, run an errand, go on an actual run, and more. I could do all those things before, but downsizing the rig makes it even easier, and it’s a fantastic addition to the already awesome experience of having a closed loop for the past 18 months (and >11,000 hours of looping). I’m so thankful for all of the people (Pete on Rileylink, Oscar on mmeowlink, Toby for soldering my first Edison rig for me, and many many others) who have been hard at work enabling more hardware options for OpenAPS, in addition to everyone who’s been contributing to algorithm improvements, assisting with improving the documentation, helping other people navigate the setup process, and more!

List of hardware for OpenAPS
That leads me to today. I just finished participating in a month-long usability study focused on OpenAPS users. (One of the cool parts was that several OpenAPS users contributed heavily to the design of the study, too!) We tracked every day (for up to 30 days) any time we interacted with the loop/system, and it was fascinating.

At one point, for a stretch of 3 days, we counted how many times we looked at our BGs. Between my watch, 3 phone apps/ways to view my data, the CGM receivers, Scott’s watch, the iPad by the bed, etc: dozens and dozens of glances. I wasn’t too surprised at how many times I glance/notice my BGs or what the loop is doing, but I bet other people are. Even with a closed loop, I still have diabetes and it still requires me to pay attention to it. I don’t *have* to pay attention as often as I would without a closed loop, and the outcomes are significantly better, but it’s still important to note that the human is still ultimately in control and responsible for keeping an eye on their system.

That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about lately: the need to set expectations when a loop comes out on the commercial market and is more widely available. A closed loop is a tool, but it’s not a cure. Managing type 1 diabetes will still require a lot of work, even with a polished commercial APS: you’ll still need to deal with BG checks, CGM calibrations, site changes, dealing with sites and sensors that fall out or get ripped out…  And of course there will still be days where you’re sensitive or resistant and BGs are not perfect for whatever reason. In addition, it will take time to transition from the standard of care as we have it today (pump, CGM, but no algorithms and no connected devices) to open and/or closed loops.

This is one of the things among many that we are hoping to help the diabetes community with as a result of the many (80+ as of June 8, 2016!) users with #OpenAPS. We have learned a lot about trusting a closed loop system, about what it takes to transition, how to deal if the system you trust breaks, and how to use more data than you’re used to getting in order to improve diabetes care.

As a step to helping the healthcare provider community start thinking about some of these things, the #OpenAPS community submitted a poster that was accepted and will be presented this weekend at the 2016 American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions meeting. This will be the first data published from the community, and it’s significant because it’s a study BY the community itself. We’re also working with other clinical research partners on various studies (in addition to the usability study, other studies to more thoroughly examine data from the community) for the future, but this study was a completely volunteer DIY effort, just like the entire OpenAPS movement has been.

Our hope is that clinicians walk away this weekend with insight into how engaged patients are and can be with their care, and a new way of having conversations with patients about the tools they are choosing to use and/or build. (And hopefully we’ll help many of them develop a deeper understanding of how artificial pancreas technology works: #OpenAPS is a great learning tool not only for patients, but also for all the physicians who have not had any patients on artificial pancreas systems yet.)

Stay tuned: the poster is embargoed until Saturday morning, but we’ll be sharing our results online beginning this weekend once the embargo lifts! (The hashtag for the conference is #2016ADA, and we’ll of course be posting via @OpenAPS and to #OpenAPS with the data and any insights coming out of the conference.)

The second year of #DIYPS (and my first full year with a closed loop)

by Dana Lewis

As we developed #DIYPS from a louder alarm system to a proactive alert system (details here about the original #DIYPS system before we closed the loop) to a closed loop that would auto-adjust my insulin pump basal rates as-needed overnight, I have been tracking the outcomes.

There were the first few nights of “wow! this works! I wake up at night when I’m high/low”. Then there were the first 100 nights that involved more iteration, testing, and improvements as we built it out more. And then suddenly it had been a year of using #DIYPS, and it was awesome to see how my average BG and a1c were down – and stayed down – while equally as important, my % time in range was up and stayed up. Not to mention, the quality of life improvements of having better nights of sleep were significant.

Year two has been along the same lines – more improvements on A1c/average BGs, time in range, and sleep – but heavily augmented by the fact that I now have a closed loop. If you follow me on Twitter or have checked out the hashtag, you might be tired of seeing me post CGM graphs. At this point, they all look very similar:

Looping for over a year and OpenAPS still successfully preventing overnight hypoglycemia Overnight safely looping with OpenAPS

(It’s worth noting that I still use #DIYPS, especially during the day to trigger “eating-soon” mode or basically get a snapshot glance at what my BGs are predicted to be, especially if I plan to go out without my loop in tow.)

In this past year, we also went from closing the loop with the #DIYPS algorithms (which required internet connectivity so I could tell the system when I was having carbs), to deciding we wanted to find a way to make it possible for more people to safely DIY a closed loop. (And, we feel very strongly that the DIY part of closing the loop is very important and deciding to do so is a very personal question.)

Thus, #OpenAPS was born in February 2015. Ben West spent a lot of time in 2015 building out the openaps toolkit to enable communication with diabetes devices to make things like closed loops possible. And so the first few months of #OpenAPS seemed slow, while we were busy working on the toolkit and finding ways to take what we learned with the #DIYPS closed loop and model a closed loop that didn’t require knowledge of carbs and could work without internet connectivity (see more about the #OpenAPS reference design here).

In July, we saw a tipping point – multiple other people began to close the loop, despite the fact that we didn’t have very much documented or available to guide them beyond the reference design. (These first couple of folks are incredible! Watch the #OpenAPS hashtag on Twitter to see them share some of their experiences.) With their help, the documentation has grown by leaps and bounds, as has the number of people who were subsequently able to close the loop.

As of 12/31/15 as I write this post, there are 22 people who have told me that they have a closed loop running that’s based on the OpenAPS reference design. I make a big deal about marking the date when I make a statement about the number of people running #OpenAPS (i.e. (n=1)*22), because every time I turn around, someone else seems to have done it!

It’s so exciting to see what’s happened in 2015, and what this type of #WeAreNotWaiting spirit has enabled. For Scott & me this year: we’ve climbed mountains around the world (from Machu Picchu to Switzerland), gotten married, changed jobs, and explored Europe together. Diabetes was there, but it wasn’t the focus.

There are dozens of other amazing stories like this in the #WeAreNotWaiting community. As we look to the new year, and I start to wonder about what might be next, I realize the speed of technology and the spirit of ingenuity in this community makes it impossible to predict exactly what we’ll see in 2016.

What I do know is this: we’ll see more people closing the loop, and we’ll see more ways to close the loop, using devices other than the Raspberry Pi, Carelink stick and Medtronic pump.  We’ll see more new ways to communicate with old & new diabetes devices and more ways to make the diabetes parts of our lives easier – all because #WeAreNotWaiting.

The power of visualizing your data, your way

by Dana Lewis

Sometimes, it’s the little things that make a big difference – even little glimpses of data, or little improvements to ways that you can control the way you access and view your data (and generate alarms).

For example, I recently had a conversation with a few people in the #WeAreNotWaiting community about the different watch faces that exist for displaying CGM data; and about how much I like my #DIYPS watch face. A few reasons why:

  • It’s a little more discreet than some watch faces showing BG data, so the average person won’t glance at my watch and see a large number.
  • It pulls from the #DIYPS interface, so I can see what I’m predicted to be, and any current recommendations (such as carbs, temp basal, or bolus needed).
DIYPS watchface showing Dana M. Lewis's OpenAPS data

It’s data-heavy, but I like having all this information without having to pull my CGM out and run calculations in my head; or pull out my phone and pull up a web page to #DIYPS; etc.

One of the many cool things about the #WeAreNotWaiting community is how together we have learned and created so many new ways to visualize our data, on various devices (tablets, phones, smart watches) and various size screens. And so when I hear that someone’s not wanting a smart watch, or isn’t using it for diabetes related things, sometimes I think it’s a matter of them finding the right tools to build their own display that works for them. Several times a week I hear about various people working on new, interesting DIY diabetes projects, and it’s awesome that we have tech to improve the tools we have – and excellent social media channels to communicate about these projects.

Related to that, I wanted to share an update – recently Milos, Jason, and others have done some really amazing work to visualize basal rates in Nightscout. (If you use Nightscout, you can get this in the 0.8.2 release – see here for more details.) This means it also can pull in temporary basal rates that are used in #OpenAPS, so you can get a nice visual showing the adjusted basal rate compared to normal scheduled basal rates – and see why it might be needed – on top of display of BG data and everything else that Nightscout offers.

Showing a fake drop in CGM glucose data that is a compression drop

In this example, it also shows how OpenAPS deals with compression drops, or how it might react to other flukey data. Remember, we designed OpenAPS to only enact 30 minute temporary basal rates in a way that is the safest possible thing to do, even if it loses communication. But if it keeps communication, and the system sees a drop and a return to the normal pattern from before (see visual), it can counteract a low temp with higher temp, or vice versa.

The visualization of temp basals in Nightscout (another example here) is an excellent improvement over how I previously used to check and see what OpenAPS had been doing. I have a watchface (similar to the above #DIYPS one) that shows me what the loop is doing currently, but when I wake up in the morning, I was mostly using a basic screen like the below to see the positive, negative, and net temp basal rates on an hourly basis and comparing that to my CGM graph to get an understanding of what happened.

Less insulin needed and OpenAPS reduced accordingly

Visualizing basal rates in Nightscout is a seemingly minor change, but every time we make a change like this that allows me to contextualize all of my data in one place (on a single glanceable watchface; or on the Nightscout screen); it saves a few seconds or minutes that add up to a lot of time saved every day, week, month, and additional year that I’m dealing with diabetes – a big win.