Electronic Treatment For Diabetes?

October 9, 2020 by Al Williams 24 Comments

If you ask power companies and cell phone carriers how much electromagnetic radiation affects the human body, they’ll tell you it doesn’t at any normal levels. If you ask [Calvin Carter] and some other researchers at the University of Iowa, they will tell you that it might treat diabetes. In a recent paper in Cell Metabolism, they’ve reported that exposing patients to static magnetic and electric fields led to improved insulin sensitivity in diabetic mice.

Some of the medical jargon in a paper like this one can be hard to follow, but it seems they feed mice on a bad diet — like that which many of us may eat — and exposed them to magnetic and electrical fields much higher than that of the Earth’s normal fields. After 30 days there was a 33% improvement in fasting blood glucose levels and even more for some mice with a specific cause of diabetes.

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A Sweet Little Insulin Reminder Light

May 19, 2020 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

So much of what we do relies on a certain societal structure that has been absent for a few months now. When the days run together, it’s hard to remember to do the things that must happen daily. You think you did something, and maybe you’re right, but it’s quite possible you’re thinking of yesterday.

[Flameeyes] has diabetes and must use an insulin pen every morning without fail, no matter what’s happening outside his door. This was pretty much a non-issue in the before-time, but quickly became a serious problem as the routine-free weeks wore on. With no room for false positives, he needed a solution that doesn’t trigger until the deed is done.

Now when [Flameeyes] puts the pen away, he also triggers a Flic smart button mounted nearby. The Flic shares its status with a Feather M4 Express through a web app, and the Feather in turn changes the RGB LED inside of Pikachu’s base from red to yellow for the day. Pikachu sits in plain sight by the kettle, so there’s no guessing whether [Flameeyes] took his insulin.

Insulin is a critical commodity with a lot of DIY interest, which is probably starting to spike about now. Our own [Dan Maloney] wrote a great piece on the subject that brings up an insulin hack from around 80 years ago.

Hacking Diabetes Hack Chat

October 14, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, October 16 at noon Pacific for the Hacking Diabetes Hack Chat with Dana Lewis!

When your child is newly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (T1D), everyone is quick to point out, “It’s a great time to be a diabetic.” To some degree, that’s true; thanks to genetically engineered insulin, more frequent or even continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), and insulin infusion pumps, diabetics can now avoid many of the truly terrifying complications of a life lived with chronically elevated blood glucose, like heart disease, kidney failure, blindness, and amputations.

Despite these advances, managing T1D can be an overwhelming task. Every bite of food, every minute of exercise, and every metabolic challenge has to be factored into the calculations for how much insulin to take. Diabetics learn to “think like a pancreas,” but it’s never good enough, and the long-promised day of a true artificial pancreas always seems to remain five years in the future.

Dana Lewis is one diabetic who decided not to wait. After realizing that she could get data from her CGM, she built a system to allow friends and family to monitor her blood glucose readings remotely. With the addition of a Raspberry Pi and some predictive algorithms, she later built an open-source artificial pancreas, which she uses every day. And now she’s helping others take control of their diabetes and build their own devices through OpenAPS.org.

Join us on the Hack Chat as Dana drops by to discuss OpenAPS and her artificial pancreas. We’ll find out what her background is – spoiler alert: she wasn’t a hacker when she started this – what challenges she faced, the state of the OpenAPS project, and where she sees the artificial pancreas going.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 16 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

[Dana Lewis image source: GeekWire]

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RFID Doing More Than ID

December 30, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 25 Comments

RFID is a workhorse in industrial, commercial, and consumer markets. Passive tags, like work badges and key fobs, need a base station but not the tags. Sensors are a big market and putting sensors in places that are hard to reach, hostile, or mobile is a costly proposition. That price could drop, and the sensors could be more approachable with help from MIT’s Auto-ID Lab who are experimenting with sensor feedback to RFID devices.

Let’s pretend you want to measure the temperature inside a vat of pressurized acid. You’d rather not drill a hole in it to insert a thermometer, but a temperature sensor sealed in Pyrex that wirelessly transmits the data and never runs out of power is a permanent and cheap solution. The researchers have their sights set on glucose sensing and that news come shortly after Alphabet gave up their RFID quest to measure glucose through contact lenses. Shown the top of this article is a prototype for a Battery Assisted Passive (BAP) RFID sensor that uses commodity glucose testing strips, sending data when the electrochemical reaction occurs. It uses six of these cells in parallel to achieve a high enough peak current to trigger the transmission. But the paper (10.1109/RFID.2018.8376201 behind paywall) mentions a few strategies to improve upon this. However, it does prove the concept that the current spike from the test strips determines the time the tag is active and that can be correlated to the blood glucose detected.

How many of our own projects would instantly upgrade with the addition of a few sensors that were previously unobtainable on a hacker budget? Would beer be brewed more effectively with more monitoring? How many wearables would be feasible with battery-free attachments? The sky is the figurative limit.

Thank you, [QES] for the tip [via TechXplore]

Eyes On The Prize Of Glucose Monitoring

December 6, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 18 Comments

People with diabetes have to monitor their blood regularly, and this should not be a shock to anyone, but unless you are in the trenches you may not have an appreciation for exactly what that entails and how awful it can be. To give a quick idea, some diabetics risk entering a coma or shock because drawing blood is painful or impractical at the moment. The holy grail of current research is to create a continuous monitor which doesn’t break the skin and can be used at home. Unaided monitoring is also needed to control automatic insulin pumps.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, gave up where Noviosense, a Netherlands company owned by [Dr. Christopher Wilson], may gain some footing. Instead of contact lenses which can alter the flow of fluids across the eye, Noviosense places their sensor below the lower eyelid. Fluids here flow regardless of emotion or pain, so the readings correspond to the current glucose level. Traditionally, glucose levels are taken through blood or interstitial fluid, aka tissue fluid. Blood readings are the most accurate but the interstitial fluid is solid enough to gauge the need for insulin injection, and the initial trial under the eyelid showed readings on par with the interstitial measurements.

Hackers are not taking diabetes lying down, some are developing their own insulin and others are building an electronic pancreas.

Via IEEE Spectrum.

Why Is Continuous Glucose Monitoring So Hard?

December 3, 2018 by Dan Maloney 99 Comments

Everyone starts their day with a routine, and like most people these days, mine starts by checking my phone. But where most people look for the weather update, local traffic, or even check Twitter or Facebook, I use my phone to peer an inch inside my daughter’s abdomen. There, a tiny electrochemical sensor continuously samples the fluid between her cells, measuring the concentration of glucose so that we can control the amount of insulin she’s receiving through her insulin pump.

Type 1 diabetes is a nasty disease, usually sprung on the victim early in life and making every day a series of medical procedures – calculating the correct amount of insulin to use for each morsel of food consumed, dealing with the inevitable high and low blood glucose readings, and pinprick after pinprick to test the blood. Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) has been a godsend to us and millions of diabetic families, as it gives us the freedom to let our kids be kids and go on sleepovers and have one more slice of pizza without turning it into a major project. Plus, good control of blood glucose means less chance of the dire consequences of diabetes later in life, like blindness, heart disease, and amputations. And I have to say I think it’s pretty neat that I have telemetry on my child; we like to call her our “cyborg kid.”

But for all the benefits of CGM, it’s not without its downsides. It’s wickedly expensive in terms of consumables and electronics, it requires an invasive procedure to place sensors, and even in this age of tiny electronics, it’s still comparatively bulky. It seems like we should be a lot further along with the technology than we are, but as it turns out, CGM is actually pretty hard to do, and there are some pretty solid reasons why the technology seems stuck.

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Homebrew Pancreas Gets 30 Minutes Of Fame

August 9, 2018 by Al Williams 25 Comments

It is pretty unusual to be reading Bloomberg Businessweek and see an article with the main picture featuring a purple PCB (the picture above, in fact). But that’s just what we saw this morning. The story is about an open source modification to an insulin pump known as the RileyLink. This takes advantage of older Medtronic brand insulin pumps and allows you to control the BLE device from a smartphone remotely and use more sophisticated software to control blood sugar levels.

Of course, the FDA isn’t involved. If they were, the electronics would cost $7,000 instead of $250 — although, in fairness, that $250 doesn’t cover the cost of the used pump. Why it has to be a used pump is a rather interesting story. The only reason the RileyLink is possible is due to a security flaw and an active hacker community.

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