ElixirConf 2017 - Building an Artificial Pancreas with Elixir and Nerves - by @tmecklem

People with Type 1 Diabetes have to constantly monitor & control their food, blood glucose, insulin, physical activity and other factors in order to manage this autoimmune disease effectively. Even with advancements like insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring, the process is still manual and error prone for many people. What would happen if someone with T1D could delegate the constant cycle of monitoring, predicting and controlling to a computer?

In this session, I’ll get personal about my own journey in supporting my T1D wife using technology. You’ll learn about an open source project called the Open Artificial Pancreas System, or OpenAPS, and how it closes the loop on a cycle that the rest of us take for granted. Then together we’ll explore what happened when I took my knowledge of OpenAPS and Elixir and glued them together with the Nerves Project.

We’ll touch briefly on the topics of hardware prototyping, reverse engineering and binary decoding and how it all came together in one project. Before the session is over, you’ll see an embedded Elixir application talk to a commercial insulin pump through the power of the Nerves Project.

All talks are available in the Elixir Conf 2017 Talks List