My 8 year old daughter has been on the Insight for almost two months having spent most of the previous four years on the Combo and to be honest, I prefer the Combo and would love to go back to it. Yes, the Insight pump is smaller and does not have the tube coming out at right angles, changing the insulin cartridge is a dream (no more manual filling and bleeding out the air bubbles) and the Insight meter produces wonderful on screen reports but I still prefer the Combo.
before I go any further let me just say that I work in IT so I'm not a Luddite. I do not like the Insight because the meter is ridiculously slow, the bolus wizard is convoluted - enter a value, press save, enter the next value, press save, etc. - and it needs recharging regularly whereas the Combo meter would run for a month on a set of batteries. It also lies about the remaining charge in the pump battery; the meter shows the current charge in the pump battery as well as the remaining insulin in the pump cartridge, all well and good till you watch that charge. It stays on 100% for day after day but once it starts to drop be careful, because it drops through the floor without warning. We were bitten by that. Apparently the UK government has issued a warning about the management of batteries in the pump and the fact that the can die without warning. When setting up a multiwave bolus on the old Combo it remembered the previous settings so if you had set the previous one for 50% immediate and the rest over 1 hour then the new one would default similarly - not so on the Insight it defaults to all 100% extended. OK for me but my daughter can't handle it. Sorry Roche but another step backwards.
I don't trust the new pump's problem detection either; whereas with our old Combo the slightest bend or blockage in the tube gave us an occlusion warning the Insight didn't even detect a bent and blocked cannula. Speaking of cannulas, the new ones have a larger adhesive pad and have been redesigned to fold the tube away inside the cannula until they are in the applicator and ready to fire. The applicator has new buttons and safety features to prevent accidental firing too - all in all, a little bit safer (perhaps) but a Hell of a lot more fiddly.
If you are the sort of person who queues up on release day for the latest iPhone then you will love the Insight but I'm a pragmatist so I don't. I don't need colour screens, I don't want additional safety buttons on the cannula applicator, I do want to know when there is a problem or an error condition, I want long and reliable battery life, in summary, I want the Combo back.
