An Engineer Coded His Artificial Pancreas To Cure Diabetes

Life is not easy if you have diabetes. You will have to continually monitor the sugar intake with every piece of food that you eat. You will also have to regularly check on the glucose level of your blood, which comes with lots of painful procedures. Being too fed up with these challenges, Liam Zebedee - a software engineer, has decided to modify his own insulin pump to make it into a new, artificial pancreas.

Artificial Pancreas

So this coded pancreas works similarly with the real biological organ. It detects the glucose level of his blood automatically and then dispenses the right dose of insulin. He has coded the device to also considers his lifestyle patterns like drinking alcohol, sleep, and exercise. It also considers the unpredictable fluctuations of his body's insulin resistance.

Liam Zebedee began with ordering needed parts and making the software for his artificial pancreas. He has managed to make a final product that is a small-size module runs on the software he coded base on the open-source OS. After, he successfully modified the insulin pump so that the module can control it. Zebedee explains his entire process of making this rig on his blog. On that blog, he also shares a lot about the frustration with the health care system.

The Cost Of This Device

In total, the biohacker used up around 979 dollars for the hardware. Later, he would incur the price of monthly maintenance for the sensors, which has to be done each 14 days. Plus, there is also the cost to subscribers to be software. Both of them together have a price tag of 225 dollars. That arrangement does not include the price of the insulin pump and the monthly dose of insulin.