Name: How High-Tech Insulin Pumps Make Managing Diabetes Easier
Uploaded: 2021-06-02T03:56:23.000Z
Duration: 14 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Technology has transformed the way we do almost everything.

And it's finally innovating diabetes management.

I know how much carbohydrate there is, and based on that information, I can

pre-programmed this little machine to give you the right amount of

insulin. Insulin pumps are not a new invention.

And with the advancement in technologies like continuous glucose monitors,

traditional pumps are evolving into smarter devices.

But companies have been slow to innovate them.

So slow that a community of diabetics, including myself, learned how to

hack into old insulin pumps by using instructions you can find online.

The DIY system, or Loop, as it's called, works so well that thousands of

diabetics started using it despite the fact that it wasn't approved by the

FDA and required you to maintain the system yourself.

Like, honestly, it looks like one of those weight loss ads where they say,

take one pill and you'll lose seventy five pounds.

But I pursued it and it built on my phone and I nearly fell apart crying.

After two days, it was a joy because Loop is open source and doesn't

It has lots of features diabetics can't get from the commercial systems.

We've talked to the DIY community for a long time.

They have very good ideas and there's a lot of things that we want to

Control-IQ. And that's useful and all that that comes from them and we

plan to do that. I just switch from Loop to Tandem's Control-IQ.

And after three months of using it, I could say it's a real game changer

and that insulin pumps are finally getting smarter.

Diabetes is becoming more and more prevalent.

Thirty four point two million Americans have some form of it.

That's one out of every 10 people, roughly five percent or one point six

When you have type one, the pancreas makes no insulin at all.

Type two can be managed in a variety of ways, including diet, exercise and

medication. But a large number of the type two population end up needing

Insulin gets injected with a needle or through a pump.

Without insulin, blood sugar will rise to unhealthy levels, causing

Insulin pumps are meant to try and mimic what a normal pancreas would do,

which is keep blood sugars under tight control.

Right now, the insulin pump users in the United States alone is between

350,000 - 500,000 people, depending on where you get the data from.

That doesn't include 40 to 50000 people with type two diabetes .

The device was invented in 1963 and was so big that it had to be worn as a

backpack. Over the past few decades, they've gotten small enough to fit

into a pocket or stick directly onto the body.

They hold up to three days of insulin and use a needle to insert tubing

under the skin. Medtronic and Tandem are tethered to the body with tubing.

Insulet's Omnipod is tubeless so it can be placed directly on the skin and

uses a smartphone like device as the controller.

But traditional pumps don't work by simply putting them on.

They need information like what your blood sugar level is and how many

Traditional insulin pumps do allow you to program a drip of background

insulin all day, but the user needs to do the rest of the work.

The size of the global insulin market was just over four billion in 2019

and is projected to grow over eight billion by 2027.

In the U.S., Medtronic, Tandem Diabetes and Insulet dominate the market.

All three have been working on hybrid closed loop systems.

A continuous glucose monitor sends blood sugar data to the pump.

The pump uses an algorithm to target a specific blood sugar range and

releases more or less insulin to keep you on target.

It's hybrid because users still need to tell it when and how many carbs

they eat. You can't just set it and forget it.

Currently, only two systems are commercially available.

Medtronic released the 670G in 2017 and Tandem just released Control-IQ.

I didn't know anybody would type one, so I didn't have anybody telling me

Like, look, I'm giving myself insulin by pressing these three buttons

instead of drawing up an injection, okay?

Managing diabetes with or without a pump can be very difficult.

Diabetics need to keep their blood sugar and as normal range as possible

to stay healthy and help prevent complications.

The invention of continuous glucose monitors changed the way people

CGM can read blood sugar levels every one to five minutes, replacing the

The focus of a system for several decades.

But decisions that really changed not only diabetes outcomes, diabetes

care just by themselves, stand alone, CGM.

But certainly as critical complement to making the systems success.

Now that a continuous stream of blood sugar data is available, the next

step is to create an algorithm and close the loop.

Insulin pumps with hybrid closed loop systems are targeting a specific

blood sugar value and then giving more or less insulin based on the CGM

data. But allowing a computer to decide how much insulin to deliver can be

a scary thing. Insulin can be very dangerous if a diabetic takes too much

or doesn't get enough. The actual math behind closing the loop is not that

difficult. It's the same math that powers your thermostat, powers your

cruise control. What becomes interesting is actually how you put all the

pieces of the system together, how the pump particular pumps are

delivering insulin, how particular sensors are measuring glucose, and then

how that algorithm takes all of those particulars and brings them

together. You're balancing the time and range and the safety profile.

And so it's that kind of secret sauce on top of just a simple control

algorithm that you need to go through and then be able to get the FDA