Looping – getting started with dosing decision making apps (or Artificial Pancreases)

I recently had a conversation with someone who was struggling to manage their lows. They lacked hypoglycaemic awareness and found themselves regularly lower than they wanted to be. It occurred to me at that point that the range of tools now available can help anyone with impaired hypo awareness (IHA) as well as give people struggling to manage levels and finding it taking too much of their time a way of relieving some of the decision making process, but the tricky bit is how to get started. There are now some really helpful open source projects that help with this, and they don’t all entail Hyrbrid Closed Looping. The information is all rather dispersed. That’s the point of this post.

My experience of the “artificial pancreas” world started with HAPP, the work done by Tim Omer to create an open loop system that could advise a user how to adjust their basal insulin levels in response to what was happening with their glucose levels. It used an earlier version of the OpenAPS algorithm, but allowed me to have alerts to a smartwatch on my wrist advising me of the best actions. Personally I still think this is the best way in to learning about looping.

As a result of that experience and what I’ve done since, with OpenAPS and Loop, I thought it would be useful to write a “Getting Started” guide, so that those who hadn’t yet encountered the looping systems available would have a resource to come to and to read, in order to get themselves going.

So I’ve written a page that goes into where to find the various tools, what you’ll need to make them work and gives some idea of the level of complexity involved. It contains links to the various open source projects that I’m aware of and should help you go to the right places to get going. This post is a little advertorial for it.

That page is here: http://www.diabettech.com/looping-a-guide/

Feel free to discuss or comment on it on the page or in this blog post. This is but a brief introduction to say “Here you go, here are the various tools, give it a go and get started”.