“I’ve had the pleasure of holding a fantastic piece of equipment in my hands over the last three days and meeting some of the smartest people I have ever met over that time period.  The above graph is simply amazing.  The top graph shows my fantastic blood sugar after eating pizza three hours prior.  Normally, that graph would look more like a graph from an ekg which is why I refuse to eat pizza, not worth it to me.  Last night I had to eat 63 carbs which is more than I typically eat in an entire day.  I ended up going slightly low to 67 based on the bolus I chose to give (looks  like someone needs to adjust their carb ratios), had a juice box to avoid going lower and spiked up to 190s.  The system brought me down to a nice flat 100 with basal rates  that were 3 to 4 times more than normal.  This system in particular is designed to adjust your blood sugar not through large boluses but through adjustments of the basal rates, which are given as mini micro basals every 5 minutes.  The micro basals are shown in the bottom graph where you see the tiny blue lines.  Even though I wasn’t thrilled to see the 190, the doctors here were happy to have their lab rat test the system.

The adjustments this system makes are nothing short of amazing.  You will see in the picture above that my blood sugar was 94 with an arrow across.  There are also two stop lights in the picture.  The stop light on the left is designed to communicate with the user about lows and the stop sign on the right about highs.  As you can see, even though my Dexcom showed an arrow pointing straight across and steady, the system put on the yellow light telling me I needed to be cautious about going low and that the system would be responding through adjustments in the basal rates.  If the red light was on, the system would be telling me you are officially low and may want to help yourself with a bit of sugar.  You can also see that the system was not worried about me going high, so it gave me the green light.  Last night when I was in the 190s, the stop light had a red light blaring at me but the system brought me down over time.

I have been pressing hard for information about what the future holds during my time here.  In tomorrow’s post I will share more information about what I have learned and what we can expect to see happen over the next couple of years.”

For the conclusion on Melissa’s journey click HERE.

For more information on the artificial pancreas project, check out the following links:

https://www.jdrf.org/blog/2013/the-artificial-pancreas-does-its-homework

http://artificialpancreasproject.com

http://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-s-artificial-pancreas-project-receives-34-million-grant