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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

mikeselectricstuff on YouTube did a teardown on the Omnipod wearable pump a while back, very cool mechanism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2MQUUkubgs

Insulin is incredibly potent and can easily result in life-altering if not fatal consequences at relatively low ratios of the therapeutic dose, so these things need to be dialed in and extremely reliable.

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YouTube teardowns from knowledgeable engineers are a gold mine for learning how real world products are engineered. I always recommend these for early career hardware students and engineers.

A friend's coworker had their pump lock on, and inject the entire reservoir of insulin into them. They were discovered in their home by the police after family members lost contact. No idea if it was an Omnipod, but I would hope that all insulin pumps have a separate watchdog circuit to prevent this.

Did they survive?

Sadly no. They were found unconscious, then taken to the hospital where the doctors determined that brain death had occurred.

While I don't have diabetes, I will be getting an advance directive made. This was horrifying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_healthcare_directive

Presumably no, but the comment is unclear - the police could have found them unconscious, although it is mostly likely they were found dead.

My wife is T1 diabetic and has the Tslim pump. When there is an occlusion at the infusion site insulin stops being delivered and blood glucose goes high.

It never occurred to me that a pump might fail in a way to give her too much insulin...

My daughter is T1 as well. This bothers me every time I think about it. You are probably already aware but if your wife is using the dexcom there’s an app called follow that she can add you to to get alerts if things go awry (highs or lows).

She probably won’t want to use it but if she worries about that at all it might provide some peace of mind.

What's so wild (and a little disheartening) is that the omnipod is a disposable device. Use it for several days, and throw it out.

This is an extreme corner of quality/cost/reliability optimization. The delivery mechanism has to be extremely repeatable and reliable, it has to fail in safe ways, but at the same time, it has to be cheap enough to throw away.

Durable pumps are all made with very expensive precision mechanisms, lots of metal and high quality plastic.

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