When Ella was diagnosed with Type One Diabetes
we realized that our lives were gonna be difficult.
When you have a child that's got Type One Diabetes,
their pancreas doesn't work.
And you, the parent, have to become that pancreas.
You're making hundreds of decisions a day for your child.
You've sort of got a life sentence in that you're
gonna have to get up three or four times a night
to keep your child safe.
You're making decisions in the middle of the night
when you're tired.
If you make a slight decision not to do something,
you could potentially harm your child.
When I first saw Scott and Dana's post about
the artificial pancreas being able to control blood sugars,
I was like, why isn't this on the market?
ELLA: So, most of them are from running.
So these are from a five K, this is from the
Seafair Torchlight Run, a medal I got at one of
the karate tournaments.
Ella is one 200,000 children in the US
diagnosed with Type One Diabetes.
It's a relentless disease.
And few people know that better than Dana Lewis.
Do you have the CGMs.
I've got the CGMs. Do you have sugar?
Yeah. I do.
I was diagnosed with Type One Diabetes
my freshman year of high school, which made it
very, very hard to deal with.
It's an autoimmune disease.
We don't know exactly what causes it, but the body
starts attacking itself, and you no longer produce insulin.
People with diabetes are always planning ahead.
Even if on the weekend, I wanted to sleep in,
I still had to wake up at the same time, take that insulin
and then go back to sleep.
If I slept through the blood sugar monitor going off
I could potentially end up in a coma.
I actually built a safety plan with my mom,
which was that she would text me every morning,
and say, are you awake?
Which was not just, are you awake, but really,
are you alive, are you okay, do you have
any problems going on?
I used different kinds of technology from different
manufacturers, and they all had the same problem,
which was me not being able to hear the alarm.
Well, we've fixed that.
So the fact that it doesn't respond at all
to single down click.
Is that just
the software? Okay. It's a bug.
It's something about the timing that's messed up.
When I first met Scott, he asked a lot of
the same questions.
Okay, how does the pump work, how does the CGM,
do they talk to each other?
He was expecting the data from one device to go
to the other.
He's like, you know, why doesn't that work?
About six months later, we stumbled across a gentleman
name John Costick, who was a parent of
a child with diabetes.
He had figured out how to reverse engineer the software
so he could pull the data off and send it to the cloud.
We were like, huh, if we could use that, we could
then build the system, send the data to my phone,
and make a louder alarm.
Wouldn't that be great?
Our goal was just make louder alarms, but we
ended up stumbling our way into building
an artificial pancreas.
Our artificial pancreas consists of a few components.
It's the insulin pump, and the continuous glucose monitor.
And what we do is we add a small computer with a radio
stick and a battery that bridges the gap and
becomes the communication device between the
pump and the CGM.
So the small rig, as we call it, the computer
and the radio stick together reads data from
the insulin pump, it reads data from the continuous
glucose monitor, maps the prediction into the future
with our algorithm, and says, here's what's gonna happen,
here's what action you need to take as a result.
But instead of alerting me as the human, it automatically
closes the loop and sends the command back
to the insulin pump, and raises or reduces the insulin
amount, then it reads the blood sugar again, and does
that same map over and over again.
It's making hundreds of decisions a day for me.
So Dana took that design and did what
any self respecting tinkerer would do.
She put it on the internet, for free.
And she called it the Open Artificial Pancreas System,
or Open APS for short.
Not only has this changed my life,
but to know that it's making a difference for other
people's lives too.
It's changing the family dynamic and making it
so much easier for them to live with diabetes.
So yeah, she still has a fair amount of IOB.
Yeah.
And she still has Fair amount of carbs,
a fair amount of carbs, so this is
actually fairly perfect.
It's doing the right thing.
So normally I would have to be sweating this,
and worried about, okay, she was low earlier this morning.
Now do I need to give her a whole bunch of insulin
to be able to make up for that?
I don't have to worry about it anymore, 'cause the
artificial pancreas is gonna continue to monitor
the situation, figure out when she's gonna hit that
crest, even before I would be able to visually see it.
That's the really cool part.
Pizza was always a challenging food.