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.
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:
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.
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”
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?
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:
However, 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.
The 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.
The 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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.)
This post was written months ago for Prescribe Design, and will also be posted/made available there as a collection of their stories by and about patients who design, but I am also posting here for anyone new to #DIYPS and/or wondering about how #OpenAPS came into existence.
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About the author: Dana Lewis is the creator of #DIYPS, the Do-It-Yourself Pancreas System, and a founder of the #OpenAPS movement. (Learn more about the open source artificial pancreas movement at OpenAPS.org.) Dana can be found online at @DanaMLewis, #DIYPS, and #OpenAPS on Twitter, and also on LinkedIn.
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Diabetes is an invisible illness that’s not often noticeable, and may be considered to be “easy” compared to other diseases. After all, how hard can it be to track everything you eat, check your blood glucose levels, and give yourself insulin throughout the day?
What most people don’t realize is that managing diabetes is an extremely complex task; numerous variables influence your blood glucose levels throughout the day, from food to activity to sleep to your hormones. Some of these things are easier to measure than others, and some are easier to influence than others, as I’ve learned over the past 13 years of living with type 1 diabetes.
Diabetes technology certainly helps – and those of us with access to insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors are thankful that we have this technology to better help us manage our disease. But this technology is still not a cure. After I run a marathon, my blood sugar is likely to run low overnight for the next few nights. And the devices I use to help me manage still have major flaws.
For example, my continuous glucose monitor (CGM) gives me a reading of my blood glucose every 5 minutes – but I have to pay attention to it in order to see what is going on (pulling the device from my pocket and pressing a button to see my numbers). And what happens when I go to sleep? I am sleeping, rather than paying attention to my blood sugar.
Sure, you can set alarms, and if your blood glucose (BG) goes above or below your personal threshold, an alarm will sound. That’s great, unless you’re a sound sleeper like me who doesn’t always hear these sounds in my sleep – and unfortunately there’s no way on the device to make the alarms louder.
For years, I worried every night when I went to sleep that I would have a low blood sugar, not hear the alarm, and not wake up in the morning. And since I moved across the country for work, and lived by myself, it could potentially be hours before someone realized I didn’t show up for work, and days before someone decided to check on me inside my apartment.
I was worried about “going low” overnight, and I kept asking the device manufacturers for louder alarms. The manufacturers usually responded, “the alarms are loud enough, most people wake up to them!” This was frustrating, because clearly I’m not one of those people.
I realized that if only I could get my CGM data off my device in real-time, I could make a louder alarm by using my phone or my laptop instead of having to rely on the existing medical device volume settings. It would be as easy as using a basic service like IFTTT or an app like “Pushover” that allows you to customize alerts on an iPhone.
However, for the longest time, I couldn’t get my data off of my device. (In fact, for years I had NO access to my own medical device data, because the FDA-approved software only ran on Windows computers, and I had a Mac.) But in November 2013, I by chance found someone who tweeted about how had managed to get his son’s data off the CGM in real-time, and he was willing to share his code with me. And this changed everything.
(At the time, my continuous glucose monitor only had FDA-approved software that could be used on a Windows computer. Since I had a Mac, when my endocrinologist asked for diabetes data, I took a picture with my iPhone and pasted the images into Excel, and printed it out for him. Data access is an ongoing struggle.)
My design “ah-ha” became a series of “wow, what if” statements. At every stage, it was very easy to see what I wanted to do next and how to iterate, despite the fact that I am not a designer and I am not a traditional engineer. I had no idea that within a year I would progress from making those louder alarms to building a full hybrid closed loop artificial pancreas (one that would auto-adjust the levels on my insulin pump overnight).
Once I had my CGM data, I originally wanted to be able to send my data to Scott (my then-boyfriend and now husband, who lived 20 miles away at the time) to see, but I didn’t want him to get alarms any time I was merely one point above or below my target threshold. What was important for him to know was if I wasn’t responding to alarms. We set up the system so that Scott could see whether or not I was taking action on a low reading, which I signaled by pressing a button. If the system alerted to Scott that I was not responding to a low reading, he could call and check on me, drive 20 miles to see me, or call 911 if necessary. (Luckily, he never needed to call 911 or come over, but within a week of building the first version of the system, he called me when my blood sugar was below 60 and I hadn’t woken up yet to the alarms.)
DIYPS prototype with Pebble
I realized next that if I was already pushing a button on the web interface (pictured), I might as well add three buttons and show him what action I was taking (more insulin, less insulin, or eating carbohydrates) in case I accidentally did the wrong thing in my sleep. I also customized the system so that I could log exactly how much insulin I was taking or how much I was eating.
Because I was entering every action I took (insulin given, any food eaten), we realized that this data could fuel real-time predictions and give precise estimates of where my blood sugar would be 30, 60, or 90 minutes in the future. As a result, I could see where my blood glucose level would be if I didn’t take action, and make sure I didn’t overcorrect when I did decide to take action. This was helpful during the day, too. The CGM has alarm thresholds that notify you if you cross the line; but #DIYPS will predict ahead of time that I am likely to go out of range, and will recommend action to help prevent me from crossing the threshold.
The system worked great and generated many alarms that woke me up at night. (Ironically, we generated so many alarms that Scott would periodically change the sound of the alarm without telling me, because my body would get used to ignoring the same sound over time!) The next step was deciding to get a smart watch (in my case, a Pebble) so I could see my data on my watch, and reduce the amount of time I spent pulling my CGM receiver out of my pocket and pressing the button to turn the screen on. With a watch, it was also easier to see real-time push alerts that the system would send me to tell me to take action. As a result, I was able to begin to spend less time throughout the day worrying about my blood sugar, and more time living my life while the system ran in the background, updating every few minutes and alerting me as to when I needed to pay attention when something changed.
We called this system the “Do It Yourself Pancreas System”, or #DIYPS, and we developed it completely in our “free time” on nights and weekends.
People often ask what my health care provider thinks. He didn’t appear very interested in hearing about this system when I first mentioned it, but he was glad to hear I was having positive outcomes with it.
More significantly, I had a lot of other people with diabetes interested in it and wanting to know how they could get it.
As a patient, I can only design tools and technology for myself; but because it would be seen by the FDA as a class III medical device (and making dosing recommendations from a CGM rather than a blood glucose meter, which the CGM is not approved for), I can not distribute it to other people to use as it would have to first be reviewed and regulated by the FDA.
We also kept iterating on #DIYPS and the algorithms I use to predict when my blood sugar is going to end up high or low. By the time we made it to November of 2014, we realized that we had a well-tested system that did an excellent job giving precise recommendations of adjusting insulin levels. If only we had a way to talk to my insulin pump, we theorized that we could turn it into a fully closed loop artificial pancreas – meaning that instead of only allowing my insulin pump to give me a pre-determined amount of insulin throughout the night, a closed loop system would instead take into account my blood sugar and make the automatic needed adjustments to give me more or less insulin as needed to keep me in range.
With the help of Ben West, another developer we met while working on Nightscout, who has spent years working on tools to communicate with diabetes devices, we were able to take a carelink USB stick and use it to communicate with my insulin pump. Plugged into a raspberry pi (a small, pocket sized computer), the carelink USB stick could pull from our algorithms, read from the pump, write commands (in the form of temporary basal rates for 30 minutes), read back the results, update the algorithm and generate new predictions and action items, and then do the same process over and over again.
And so, with the help of various community members, we had closed the loop with our artificial pancreas. And once I had it turned on, testing, and working, it was hard to convince me to take it off. This was December of 2014. More than a year and a half later, I’m still wearing and using it every day and night.
There are definitely challenges to having self-designed a device. There are usability issues, such as the burden of keeping it powered and extra supplies to haul around. But as a patient, and as the designer, I can constantly iterate and make improvements to algorithms or the device setup itself and make it better as I go, all while having the benefit of this lifesaving technology (and more importantly, having the peace of mind to be able to go to sleep safely at night).
And, I have the ability to communicate and spread the word that this type of DIY technology is possible. I frequently talk with others who are interested in building their own artificial pancreas system as part of the OpenAPS movement. Like #DIYPS, I can’t give away an #OpenAPS implementation or build someone else an artificial pancreas. But through #OpenAPS, the community has collectively published a reference design, documentation and code, and established a community to support those who are choosing to do an n=1 implementation, following the reference design we have shared. As of the beginning of May 2016, there have been a total of 56+ people who have decided to close the loop by building individual OpenAPS implementations, with more in progress. (And today, you can see the latest community count of DIY closed loopers here.) You can read more here about the risks and how it is a personal decision to decide to build your own system; each person has to decide if the work to DIY and the risk is worth the potential reward.
For me, this definitely has been and is worth the time and effort. It’s worth noting that I am glad there are traditionally designed devices going into clinical trials and are in the pipeline to be made available to more people. But the timeline for this is years away (2017-2018), so I am also glad that the technology (including social media to enable our community to connect and design new tools together) is where it is today.
You don’t have to be an engineer, or formally trained, to spot a problem with disease management or quality of life and build a solution that works for you. Who knows – the solution that works for you may also work for other people. We can design the very tools we need to make our lives with diabetes, and other diseases, so much better – and we shouldn’t wait to do so.
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:
(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.)
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 someof theirexperiences.) 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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet some fantastic people through our work with #DIYPS and #OpenAPS, one of whom is Eric Von Hippel, an MIT professor and researcher who work on user innovation. He shared a great example of user innovation that I was previously unfamiliar with, but is an awesome parallel for what we in the diabetes community are doing.
History: bike manufacturers used to make bikes for riding on flat surfaces. Some people wanted to ride their bikes down mountains, but existing bikes weren’t too comfortable (they didn’t have spring-based seats – ouch!). So, bikers started customizing and modifying the bikes they had. Eventually, bike manufacturers saw the demand and started building mountain bikes with the same features that the original mountain bikers had used. (And if you don’t like my paraphrased version of this story, Wikipedia is always your friend!)
Are there commercial products coming to market or are in the market that meet some of these needs now? Sure. But remember, I’ve had diabetes since 2002. In 2013, when Scott and I first started working to solve my need for louder alarms, there was NO commercial solution available for either remote data access or alarm customization. Thus the need for #DIYPS, which we built in 2013, and Nightscout, which blossomed in early 2014. And even though tools like Dexcom SHARE and MiniMed Connect have come to market (and in some cases, more quickly with help from the community communicating to the FDA about the critical importance of these tools), they came in 2015, which is a long time to wait for new tools when you’re dealing with diabetes 24/7/365. And when we managed to close the loop, again with help from the amazing #wearenotwaiting community, in December of 2014? Well, it’s now nearing the end of a year (and with amazing continued results from #OpenAPS not just for me, but for 13 additional people and potentially more to come soon), and we are AT LEAST a year and a half, if not more, away from any commercial device to reach the market. Not to mention: I’m not sure that the first generation of closed loops commercially available will be good enough for me.
The commercial entities are getting there. And, I always want to give them credit – I have a closed loop, but I can’t have one without a solidly working insulin pump and an excellent CGM system. They are, for the most part (with the exception of some missing features), making good, solid safe products for me to use.
The manufacturers are also starting to be open to more conversations. Not just “listening”, which they’ve sort-of/maybe done in drips over the past, but actual two-way conversations where we can share the needs that we know of in the community, and discuss what can be incorporated into their commercial product pipeline more quickly. This is progress starting to be made, and I’m excited to see more of it. It seems like there is a refreshed mindset and energy in the industry, as well as an understanding that we all care deeply about safety and that we’re all in this together to make life with diabetes less of a burden – like riding downhill on a mountain bike rather than a road bike.
I have been asked more and more lately, “Are you going to make this available to less tech-savvy people?” and “Should I build one?”.
The answer to the first question is emotionally hard, because a DIY build of a medical device that auto-adjusts insulin will always involve some technical knowledge – or at the very least, a growth mindset and willing to learn many new things to build a technical knowledge in order to proceed through the murky process of building a not-100%-documented artificial pancreas. You don’t have to be a programmer or an engineer; but you do have to have time and energy to spend learning as well as doing. I say this every day: the DIY part is important.
(And, I know people always want to hear “yes! It’ll be out on X date, and just as easy as installing Nightscout.” But it’s not as easy as installing something like Nightscout and never will be.)
That leads into the second question as an explanation of why it’s not as easy as we would wish:
Even if you have a very technical background, you’ll still spend time learning new languages, new pieces of software, and building pieces of your own. Things will break, things will need to be improved, and you need to have the knowledge of what’s going on and understand the logic of what you’re trying to achieve at each stage in order to be able to troubleshoot both the code part of things and the diabetes part of things.
It is hard. And it is a lot of work.
What you don’t see when someone says they’ve (DIY) closed the loop:
For every “I had such a great night” picture someone posts, that probably represents at least (10?+) hours of working on building or troubleshooting their system. Scott and I have each spent hundreds of hours working with my system, from trouble shooting, to building in new features, to reaffirming that things are all working as planned, etc. That figure should be a bit lower for new people as a result of our efforts, but it will never be as easy as just plugging something in, giving it your weight, and letting it take over. The system only does what you program it to do.
I often say this is “not a set-and-forget” system. And this is also true in the wearability of it. Right now, I use a Raspberry Pi and Carelink USB stick to communicate with my pump. They’re great, but the separate power source I also have to keep charged, plus keeping the USB in range of my pump, plus making sure it’s all working, can be a headache sometimes. (Which is why I’m so glad we made an offline mode, to reduce one of the biggest headaches of using the system.) When I’m on the go during the day, sometimes I don’t take it with me, or I choose to stop and un-power it and resume it when I get home. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people use it for nighttime use only (at least for the most part). But even with nighttime use only, there’s still constant changing of the code (in some cases daily), tweaking, altering, fixing, breaking, and un-breaking various parts.
Did I mention it was a lot of work?
And does a closed loop prevent all lows and highs? No.
It’s important to realize this is not a cure. I work really hard to do eating soon mode before meals to prevent spikes from the amount of carbs I choose to eat. I still have to test my blood sugar and calibrate my CGMs multiple times a day. I still have to change out my pump site every 2-3 days, and deal with the normal hassles of wonky pump sites, etc. I still have some highs – although the loop helps me handle them and I spend less time above range. And I still have some lows – although usually they’re from human error related to bolusing, the loop helps prevent them from always being a true low and/or blunting the drop so I don’t require as much correction. But diabetes is still a good amount of work, even with a closed loop.
Is it worth it to self-build an artificial pancreas?
This is a personal question. It’s a lot of work, with risk involved.
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.
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