
Health hackers: Patients taking medical innovation into their own hands - TuxMulder
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/26/health-hackers-patients-taking-medical-innovation-into-own-hands
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omh
As a Type 1 diabetic I've been watching these hackers with interest. There's
clearly some great opportunities for linking continuous glucose monitoring and
insulin pumps, particularly for young children. Compared to old-school closed
medical devices it looks like we might get much more data and much more
control over what's going on.

But it's easy to see why the commercial companies haven't produced this yet.
If a bug in this means you get too much insulin then you'll end up passing out
and it could kill you within a really short length of time.

I spoke to one of my doctors about it and he seemed slightly scared at what
these people are trying. There have been doctors researching this for years in
carefully controlled trials, and now there are hundreds of people just
plugging together phones and trying it out for themselves.

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gayprogrammer
> There have been doctors researching this for years in carefully controlled
> trials...

You assume this is true, yet if it exists, all useful information is kept
behind closed doors. The technology to make this work has existed relatively
unchanged for years.

That is the point of the hashtag #wearenotwaiting

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samuell
I'm wondering about the term "hacking" here. Anything else than mere
monitoring would seem extremely stupid. Common wisdom has that you don't ever
hack on a production system, much less so a critical, life-sustaining one.

Of course, improved monitoring is not bad, but is it really "health hacking"?

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gayprogrammer
> although they don’t admit genuine hackers such as Omer

I wonder what this means, and what has happened to make the reporter say this.

