"Medical Device Hacking" is a large part of how my wife and I slept at night for the last few years, based on the open source Nightscout [1] project which interfaced my kids' Dexcom CGMs to our smartphones. Continuous Glucose Monitors allow T1Ds to track their blood sugar without finger sticks and are particularly useful at night for catching lows.
The Nightscout project was a strong motivator for Dexcom to push harder on developing and improving their remote monitoring solution. A solution which could easily have languished in R&D and FDA approval hell for another 5-10 years got to market much more quickly once users were out there DIY'ing their own remote monitors.
Additionally there are a lot of "mis-features" that are coded into T1D products, presumably foisted on companies by the FDA to avoid liability, but which ultimately are a mild form of torture on end-users day in and day out. Having an option to turn to open source alternatives when the incessant alarms which can't be disabled are driving you mad is better than throwing out the device altogether. For those who haven't used or know anyone who has a pump, pod, or CGM -- the problem is that the devices are subject to dozens of variables which impact their performance, reliability, or accuracy, and alarms are often "lacking context" (to put it mildly) or outright wrong.
E.g. When you've treated a low and double checked with a finger stick that blood sugar is rising, a siren going off every 5 minutes from the CGM at 4am is enough to want to remove the CGM and smash it with a hammer.
Having open source alternatives is a large part of, I believe, forcing Dexcom and even the FDA "to the table" to reconsider hard-coded patient hostile "features". It's easier to appease the lawyers and go into CYA mode, when there's isn't a strong open source competitor with 28,000 Facebook followers and a Github repo with 21,000 forks [2].
[1] - http://www.nightscout.info/
[2] - https://github.com/nightscout/cgm-remote-monitor/
The Nightscout project was a strong motivator for Dexcom to push harder on developing and improving their remote monitoring solution. A solution which could easily have languished in R&D and FDA approval hell for another 5-10 years got to market much more quickly once users were out there DIY'ing their own remote monitors.
Additionally there are a lot of "mis-features" that are coded into T1D products, presumably foisted on companies by the FDA to avoid liability, but which ultimately are a mild form of torture on end-users day in and day out. Having an option to turn to open source alternatives when the incessant alarms which can't be disabled are driving you mad is better than throwing out the device altogether. For those who haven't used or know anyone who has a pump, pod, or CGM -- the problem is that the devices are subject to dozens of variables which impact their performance, reliability, or accuracy, and alarms are often "lacking context" (to put it mildly) or outright wrong.
E.g. When you've treated a low and double checked with a finger stick that blood sugar is rising, a siren going off every 5 minutes from the CGM at 4am is enough to want to remove the CGM and smash it with a hammer.
Having open source alternatives is a large part of, I believe, forcing Dexcom and even the FDA "to the table" to reconsider hard-coded patient hostile "features". It's easier to appease the lawyers and go into CYA mode, when there's isn't a strong open source competitor with 28,000 Facebook followers and a Github repo with 21,000 forks [2].
[1] - http://www.nightscout.info/
[2] - https://github.com/nightscout/cgm-remote-monitor/