A "bionic pancreas" controlled by a smartphone and medical equipment allowed 24 people with Type 1 diabetes to maintain near-normal blood sugar control in a tough test surprised researchers.
“I was astonished at how well it worked in a real-world setting,”
Ed Damiano of Boston University, who worked on the project, told NBC News.
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The system is the brainchild of a collaborative group from Boston University and Massachusetts General Hospital.
The test of the bionic pancreas, which the researchers hope to have on the U.S. market by 2017, involved using a smartphone, two pumps attached to the abdomen, a glucose monitor, and a computer program to calculate doses.
The senior author in the group is Edward Damiano, of Boston University, and he’s been working on the technology
since his son was diagnosed with diabetes as a baby, Bloomberg News said.
The system was tested in 20 adults and 32 adolescents, who Bloomberg said can be challenging to manage because they often need double the amount of insulin as their hormones change and they grow.
Stanley Baker, 76, got to test the bionic pancreas.
“I tell you, as a diabetic, you are always thinking about your blood sugar,” he told Bloomberg. “This totally relieves you of managing the diabetes. A lot of the concern I have on a regular basis was gone. It was extremely liberating.”
Damiano
told NPR about the challenge of dealing with juvenile diabetes, including jumping up in the middle of the night when an alarm sounds that his 15-year-old son’s blood sugar has dropped.
“The fear is that there's going to be this little cold limb, and I screwed up. It's all on me," Damiano told NPR.
As an associate professor of biomedical engineering, Damiano changed his career focus to tackle his son’s diagnosis — and hopefully help the 3 million Americans with Type 1 diabetes.
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