Programming the monitor and pump to communicate
“Any time you’re outside of it, you’re doing damage to your organs
and causing the onset of complications,” says Andrew McKee, CEO of Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Canada.
The artificial pancreas won’t be as precise as natural sugar control, but it should virtually eliminate levels of blood sugar that are beyond the normal range. This will also sharply reduce the long-term risk of damage to the circulatory system, which often leads to heart attacks, and can lead too amputations or blindness, for example, conditions that carry a high personal cost and impose a huge burden on an over-stretched health care system.
Programming the monitor and pump to communicate with each other has been tricky, McKee says. While the body’s insulin has an immediate impact, it can take 20 to 60 minutes, depending on the person, for the externally supplied synthetic form of it to take effect. So the artificial pancreas pump must anticipate daily habits: If, for example, lunch is usually at 12:30 and the patient’s response time is half an hour, the insulin shot to handle it
privatization goes at noon.
