Hi, all, a few snippets from today's T1D Rise of the Machines Scotland event, which was about looping.
As someone who really likes a long-lie in at the weekends, it was a bit of a surprise to find that things like 8:00am and 9:00am actually existed on Saturdays. I thought they were just during the week.
Staff on the Libre stall were vague about it as it was above their paygrade but the indications were that libre version 2 is not going to be launched in the UK any time soon, perhaps as much as a year away, so anyone putting off getting MiaoMiao preferring to wait for v2 alerts will probably be in for a long wait.
The docs there all said that clinicians see closed loop as the future but were honest enough to say that the loop pioneers know way more about it than they do and one had actually arranged for a looper to give educational sessions to HCPs about it.
One said that when it comes to reviewing their area's policy on which pumps to provide, they're going to be factoring into the equation a pump's capacity for playing with open source looping.
One said that although this stuff is do-able, it takes motivation, and the pumps need to be more plug-and-play.
One slide showed that although NICE was really talking the talk about pump availability 10 yrs ago, actual provision in E&W is only about 5% and 11% in Scotland.
Dana Lewis, who is like
the pioneer of looping, has a new book out, Automated Insulin Delivery, which looks like it will be the go to first read for anyone interested in exploring this.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Automated-...very&qid=1558193930&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull
She explained her motivation behind it all: she went through spells of being terrified of going to sleep. I think most of us have probably had that after a bad night hypo.
She and others made it clear that the open source community are actively talking to pump makers and some of their code is in pumps now.
No surprise really - they reckon that collectively there is over 11 million hours of experience of loop, compared to the 100,000 hrs or so which medical devices usually go through for certification.
Had a sketch at the Kaleido stall. It's a new entrant to the patch-pump market, well, sort of - patch with a very short tube and cannula patch beside it. Very small, about the same size as an omnipod but thinner. The difference is you don't chuck the whole thing, just the tiny reservoir and set. Quite a neat little gizmo, but because it's so new, no telling when it will be available.
Oh, and there were a few boxes of what were Glucotabs but have now been rebranded as "Lift", so if you're in Boots restocking, watch out for the name change. Snagged a few of those - they still taste like chalk.
In other news - was in the office yesterday, my boss offered me a slice of a Mr Kipling cake (not in a bad, you're diabetic, can you eat this way, he's a decent bloke), had a glance at my cgm, decided it wasn't the right time for it, so I said, hmm, let me see if I can guess the carb count. So, eyed it up a bit, compared it to a 40g tesco cheesecake and a 10g kinder bueno, reckoned it was about 20g, but called it at 22 to make it sound as if accuracy matters. So he looks at the box and says, close, it's 31. I said, ***, that's never 31, give me the box. And label says the 31 was the total weight, and the carb turned out to be...wait for it...21.6! I really couldn't resist doing some showboating - putting that on my T1 CV - who needs scales or labels, eyeballed it to only 0.4g out! And the boss was sitting there saying how the f did you do that? We've got to make our own entertainment with T1!
