Scott Hanselman is a Type 1 Diabetic and has been for nearly 25 years. Being an engineer and fed up on waiting for a cure he decided to do something himself. When Scott was first diagnosed with diabetes he wrote an app and fast forward many years, he is now connected 24 hours to an open source artificial pancreas. However, he does still also use popular glucose monitoring devices and insulin pumps. He done a talk explaining what he has created which can be viewed below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7xc_Fb9r28

Scott begins by explaining the need to knows of diabetes. He used the analogy of an aeroplane and stated that if an aeroplane is at a high altitude, you will be slowly killed (high blood sugar slowly causing blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage). On the other hand if an airplane is too low to the ground you will quickly die (low blood sugar causing a rather quick seizure or coma).

He discusses closing the loop. The loop of diabetes needs to be closed, a Tesla autopilot for diabetes is needed. For a person with the normal functioning pancreas they have a continuous loop process in which you eat, insulin is released at the correct amount and blood sugar levels remain stable. However for a diabetic, you eat and blood sugar levels go sky high breaking the loop, meaning human intervention is needed to try and repair it. I want to try my best to close the loop with Insurin. Scott knows two languages, English and code. He used what his language was (code), to create something innovative which hadn’t been thought of at the time.

I find Scotts talk inspirational as he is someone who saw and experienced a problem, then went out of his way to fix it as best he could. He has now 6000 ‘loopers’ using his product which administers insulin and reads blood glucose levels. This is similar to my product however as if stated previously, education and guidance is needed which his product doesn’t seem to yet provide.