Liam Drew in Nature:
Ten years ago, a tech-savvy group of people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) decided to pursue a DIY approach to their own treatment. They knew that a fairly straightforward piece of software could make their lives much easier, but no companies were developing it quickly enough. What this software promised was freedom from having to constantly measure and control their blood-glucose levels. In people without T1D, when glucose levels rise, cells in the pancreas release insulin, a hormone that helps tissues to absorb that glucose. In T1D, these cells are killed by the immune system, leaving people with the condition to manage their blood sugar by taking insulin. “It is almost inhumane,” says Shane O’Donnell, a medical sociologist at University College Dublin, who, like everyone quoted in this article, lives with T1D. “You’re constantly having to think about diabetes in order to survive.”
Members of the nascent DIY community were using the most sophisticated technology available: insulin pumps and wearable devices called constant glucose monitors. But they still had to read the monitor’s data, forecast their diet and exercise and then calculate the appropriate insulin dose. What they wanted was automation — an algorithm that would analyse glucose data and program the pump itself. Coalescing around this aim in 2013, the community debuted a hashtag: #WeAreNotWaiting. Then, in February 2015, group member Dana Lewis shared the code for an algorithm that she and two collaborators had developed and tested.
More here.