Comment Insulin Pump (Score 1) 57
Besides the obvious "Pumps are easy hacking targets," and "It's a CGM, not an artificial pancras you marketing schmuck,"... It's obvious we need better firmware and 3rd party testing for these devices. Medtronic in particular seems to be challenged in the data-accuracy department. Their Continuous Glucose Monitors seem to be the most expensive and most inaccurate glucometers manufactured in the past 20 years. Although I'd like to know what legislative hurdles remain for the creation of more open devices for us, the question my Endocrinologist is a bit more general and full of nuance. He would like to know how does a Doctor deal with the absolute insanity that is data reporting - just about every device, be it pump, glucometer, or CGM combo has the ability to export data, but requires some expensive proprietary setup to get the data out of the device (or is locked in a cloud). His office has stopped acquiring these devices due to the fragmentation and cost... and now I'm back to using paper for reporting (5-10 samples a day, submitted every quarter). Finding trends for most of my fellow patients has become more difficult, not less. As a typical /. reader, I manually transcribe my samples/tests (a timestamp/reading value tuple) into CSV files and follow up with some R (programming language) to do some simple trend analysis.
The typical capitalist approach of "vote with your wallet" doesn't apply to this regulated market especially because it's the insurance companies that pay most of the cost. How can we compel manufacturers to use an standardized format for reporting, something like a standard physical interface like USB for those of us who use non-implanted devices, and most importantly how do we get into the hands of medical health professionals an easy to use standardized device for post-facto data collection and analysis? And furthermore, my Endo was unaware of the Defcon presentation hack as recently as 3 weeks ago - where can they go to find this information about security?
The typical capitalist approach of "vote with your wallet" doesn't apply to this regulated market especially because it's the insurance companies that pay most of the cost. How can we compel manufacturers to use an standardized format for reporting, something like a standard physical interface like USB for those of us who use non-implanted devices, and most importantly how do we get into the hands of medical health professionals an easy to use standardized device for post-facto data collection and analysis? And furthermore, my Endo was unaware of the Defcon presentation hack as recently as 3 weeks ago - where can they go to find this information about security?
