This could be engineered around--mostly the limitations are liability.
If you, the patient, take a glucose sensor, an insulin pump and tie them together with an app, you don't get to sue somebody if something fails and you die.
If a company takes all three of those, packages them together, and sells them, then that company is now liable when one of the pieces fails and you wind up dead.
The sad part is that AI/ML would be incredibly useful for all this. People could take pictures of their meals, upload their sleep and exercise data, and weigh themselves, feed all that into a cloud algorithm that could determine how you are likely to react and dial your insulin plan into your pump while feeding the glucose readings back to the cloud.
Sadly, I suspect none of this is going to happen in the US due to the liability. Maybe China will pull this off.
I don't want to call your comment ignorant, but you are lacking a lot of the information necessary to see why it's not that easy.
For starters: Insulin is quite long acting. Maybe 4 hours for some injected "short-acting" types. Regular insulin (like the one from the pancreas) acts for maybe 6 hours. The ratio of how much insulin you need for a given weight of carbs doesn't stay constant. If you inject too much insulin, if you raise your carb intake, that leads to a higher ratio. Physical exercise modifies the ratio in a short-term fashion. Inflammation, like from a cold or other infection, can raise the ratio significantly. You could model the situation with a bunch of differential equations, and that's what a lot of scientific
Most of these variables can't even be estimated precisely enough because there is too little data for too much variation. ML/AI is good at using information in the dataset that is hard to describe or see for Humans. But it can't use information that just isn't in the input data, it's not magic. For Type-2 diabetes there are relatively simple rules that work remarkably well. Type-1 is a lot harder, partly because a lot of the "buffering" of the system dynamics is missing.
> The sad part is that AI/ML would be incredibly useful for all this. People could take pictures of their meals,
Pictures of food are nowhere near near enough data to determine the carb content of a food. My SO has T1, and there have been times where there's been no visible change, and I can only taste a vague change in the taste of some food item and the changes it caused to their blood glucose were wildly different that what it had done previously.
> Conversely, it sucks to know that software you wrote is responsible for having killed even one person - to say nothing of doing so at scale.
But, how many people did your software improve the lives of?
This is the real problem with stuff like T1D automatic insulin control loops. You will likely kill some number of people through failure modes. However, how much better will the lives of those people whom you didn't kill be? T1D results in a lot of complications over time that, if they could be controlled, would result in a significant increase in quality of life for the survivors.
I actually had this discussion with a doctor who invented an asthma monitor for his daughter. It would automatically inform him and the school nurse as well as transmit the severity of event so the father could dispatch an ambulance immediately if it was really bad. I assure you it worked as well as it possibly could. However, nobody would touch turning it into a product because, at some point, the monitor was going to miss an event (bad detection, cellular system transmission failure, something) and some child was going to die and the liability was going to be enormous.
And that asthma monitor is a much easier case to discuss as it's all upside--the monitor failing doesn't kill anybody. Without the monitor, some number of children will die anyway. With the monitor, some number of those children will be saved.
Having this discussion about T1D is much more difficult.
If you, the patient, take a glucose sensor, an insulin pump and tie them together with an app, you don't get to sue somebody if something fails and you die.
If a company takes all three of those, packages them together, and sells them, then that company is now liable when one of the pieces fails and you wind up dead.
The sad part is that AI/ML would be incredibly useful for all this. People could take pictures of their meals, upload their sleep and exercise data, and weigh themselves, feed all that into a cloud algorithm that could determine how you are likely to react and dial your insulin plan into your pump while feeding the glucose readings back to the cloud.
Sadly, I suspect none of this is going to happen in the US due to the liability. Maybe China will pull this off.