JDRF Ride and an intro to "Looping"

My son Griffin has Type 1 diabetes (T1D) – a nasty, chronic, and currently incurable disease. I am biking 100 miles on Saturday, August 10th in JDRF’s ‘Ride to Cure’ in Lacrosse, WI to raise money to help mitigate, prevent and find a cure for T1D. JDRF is the organization that funds important research in all of these areas. Our story is here if you're interested in learning more or maybe even considering a contribution: https://www2.jdrf.org/goto/teamgriff

I thought it would be helpful to provide some personal context for the type of innovations that JDRF supports. The pictures here show Griff holding a thing called a “RileyLink” that allows his continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and his insulin pump to communicate with an algorithm/app on his iPhone. That algorithm predicts his blood sugar and changes insulin delivery every five minutes to help keep him in a safe blood sugar range. The app called “Loop” for short (shown below) means there is a ‘closed loop’ between his insulin pump and CGM, which greatly reduces the burden of treatment decisions. Instead of constantly thinking about and treating highs and lows that come with T1D, Griff (and his mom and I) get a fair amount of help from the algorithm. What that means in practice is that Griff stays longer in a safe and healthy blood sugar range, and has fewer 2 am alarms and wake up calls to treat dangerous highs and lows…

JDRF didn’t fund the initial development of this advancement – it was done “in the wild” by a bunch of wonderful, committed hackers. But JDRF has recently funded Tidepool - an organization that will make this platform available to hundreds of thousands of people https://www.jdrf.org/press-releases/tidepool-to-develop-tidepool-loop-with-new-6m-funding-commitment-from-helmsley-charitable-trust-and-jdrf/ - rather than just the handful of us who have gone a little rogue with this open-source platform.

For those really curious, there is more here about Loop https://loopkit.github.io/loopdocs/ and and a fascinating read here about how it came to be for the Omnipod (the particular insulin pump my son Griff wears) https://blog.usejournal.com/insulin-pumps-decapped-chips-and-software-defined-radios-1be50f121d05.