Tidepool and Boston University are pleased to announce that we have recently completed a collaboration to create a fully-designed user interface for the Bionic Pancreas, and that we are releasing these designs freely to the public.
Take these designs, please. Use them. Continue to innovate and iterate beyond what we’ve done. We are doing this for the greater good of the type 1 community and we hope you’ll pay it forward.
Tidepool’s mission is to help everyone with Type 1 Diabetes. As a non-profit, we have made the decision that we will only work on projects that support our mission and openly benefit the type 1 diabetes community. That’s why all of our source code is released under a permissive open source license. And it’s also why we chose to work on this project.
The team at Boston University deserves huge kudos for seeing the value and importance in releasing these designs openly. Doing so not only moves the Bionic Pancreas project significantly forward, but it also gives all other closed-loop artificial pancreas projects a reference design that they can leverage as they see fit. We all want the same thing: to reduce the burden of managing type 1 diabetes for ourselves and our loved ones. The more we share our work, the more quickly we can all make progress.
The Bionic Pancreas UI designs can be found in their entirety here on GitHub. There you’ll find:
One thing you’ll notice right away is that the Bionic Pancreas UI is designed in black and white, well actually in shades of grey. Early in the design process, Ian Jørgensen on the Tidepool team suggested to the Bionic Pancreas team that they consider using an eInk screen, similar to what you find on a Kindle e-reader. eInk displays have great resolution, use very little power and have incredible readability even in bright sunlight.
Obviously, much more work remains for a Bionic Pancreas to become a commercial reality. Having a user interface that can be iterated upon based on real user feedback is one huge milestone along the journey to deliver this revolutionary device.
Big thanks to Boston University and the Bionic Pancreas team led by Ed Damiano and Firas El-Khatib for asking Tidepool to help with this. The Tidepoolers who primarily worked on this effort were Sara Krugman on UI Design and Ian Jørgenson on coding. Great work, team!
Look forward to more blog posts soon on the design process as well as some of the challenges that went into the process. We hope exposing how we think about things and operate will also be helpful to the community as a whole.
Cheers,Howard
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