Explaining Nightscout by Lane Desborough
Gary Wolf
February 23, 2016
Today the New York Times published a fantastic story by Peter Andrey Smith about the Nightscout and OpenAPS projects: A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes Care. People with diabetes and parents of kids with diabetes are self-tracking by necessity, and we’ve learned a lot from their talks about their projects at QS meetings and conferences. Their impact is growing. Reading Smith’s story inspired me to repost a talk by Nightscout pioneer Lane Desborough, along with links to additional people and resources that didn’t make it into the Times story.
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Nightscout, which Lane describes in this wonderful talk, allows people with people with diabetes and parents of kids with diabetes the see real time data from a blood glucose monitor on a mobile device. While similar efforts are underway among manufacturers, leadership is coming from patients and caregivers.
The quality and commitment here can inspire anybody who is thinking about how QS tools fit into new forms of knowledge and cooperation. The projects Lane discusses in this talk have continued to grow and evolve. Supported by a remarkable group of activists and a technically expert community made up mainly of people with diabetes and parents of kids with diabetes, contributors to these projects have created a suite of tools that can dramatically improve self-care.
For instance, a couple of weeks ago I saw this tweet from Howard Look, founder of Tidepool:
At 7:11p my daughter received her first insulin delivered by a software decision. #OpenAPS #WeAreNotWaiting pic.twitter.com/NsAgTiunu5
— Howard Look (@howardlook) January 15, 2016
Did you know that people with diabetes have been building their own artificial pancreas systems? Read more about Nightscout, the Open Artificial Pancreas System, and related projects at these links:
Dana Lewis on the Open Artificial Pancreas System
Background on the #OpenAPS Project
Tidepool: A platform for diabetes data and the apps that use it
Nightscout project on Facebook
