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posted by janrinok on Thursday May 10 2018, @12:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-bogart-that-code dept.

OpenSource.com reports

Dana Lewis is the 2018 Women in Open Source Community Award winner! Here is her story about how open source improved her health in a big way.

Dana has Type 1 diabetes and commercially available medical devices were failing her. The continuous glucose monitor (CGM) alarm she was using to manage her blood sugar was not loud enough to wake her up. The product design put her in danger every time she went to sleep.

"I went to a bunch of manufacturers and asked what they could do, and I was told, 'It's loud enough for most people.' I was told that 'it's not a problem for most people, and we're working on it. It'll be out in a future version.'' That was all really frustrating to hear, but at the same time, I didn't feel like I could do anything about it because it's an FDA-approved medical device. You can't change it."

These obstacles aside, Dana thought that if she could get her data from the device, she could use her phone to make a louder alarm. Toward the end of 2013, she saw a tweet that provided an answer to her problem. The author of the tweet, who is the parent of a child with diabetes, had reverse-engineered a CGM to get the data off his child's device so that he could monitor his child's blood sugar remotely.

She realized that if he was willing to share, she could use the same code to build a louder alarm system.

"I didn't understand that it was perfectly normal to ask people to share code. That was my first introduction to open source."

[...] As Dana got more involved with the open source diabetes community, she met Ben West. He had spent years figuring out how to communicate with the insulin pump Dana used. Unlike a CGM, which tells the user if their blood sugar is high or low, an insulin pump is a separate device used to continuously infuse insulin throughout the day.

"A light bulb went off. We said, 'Oh, if we take this code to communicate with the pump with what we've done to access the data from the CGM in real time and our algorithm, we can actually process data from both devices in real time and create a closed-loop system.'"

The result was a do-it-yourself artificial pancreas system (DIY APS).

[...] "Because we had been using open source software, we knew that the right thing to do was to turn around and make what we had done open source as well so that other people could leverage it." And thus, OpenAPS (the Open Source Artificial Pancreas System) was born.


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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:43AM (2 children)

    by edIII (791) on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:43AM (#677698)

    Yep. I always laugh when the self checkout stand at the grocery store BSODs, and I see Windows XP POS edition running on it.

    It would be easier, cheaper, and better to go with Linux/BSD for embedded devices, but good luck getting certification on it or its introduction into any supply chain.

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:41AM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday May 10 2018, @03:41AM (#677734) Journal

    but good luck getting certification on it or its introduction into any supply chain.

    What makes you think there is any "certification" on such checkout systems?

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