Overview
With the presentation date fast approaching, I knew that at this point it was important for me to start wrapping up the project and creating some working prototypes of my insulin pump.
Day 1
Now that I have completed my Python program that will run my insulin pump, it is now time to test a couple different pumping mechanisms that I have found under the thingiverse.com keyword ‘motorized syringe push’. Much of the day was spent making tweaks to the designs and trying to find which design would work best for my insulin pump.
Day 2
On the second day potential disaster struck, but before I get to that I do have good news. After my testing of designs on day one, I have come to the conclusion that this design would work best:
This design works off of an rack and pinion set up (explained here) to push the insulin out of a reservoir tube (the container that holds the insulin). This is the only design that produced repeatable results, and in biotechnology consistency is key, so that is why I chose this design.
On to the bad news. Apparently Gettysburg College has been making some changes to its firewall, and my mechanism of pulling data from my database in the cloud has tripped the updated firewall, preventing me from getting any data from the cloud. Unfortunately this issue is impossible for myself to fix, however, I am working with Eric Yurick to help sort out the issue.
Day 3 and 4
While my program was down, I figured that it was important to try and calibrate the pump to actually pump close to the desired amount of insulin. This insulin pump will never actually be connected to someone (because of the dangers it presents), and each person responds to insulin therapy in different ways, so there is no true way to have it perfectly calibrated to someone (and I guess it really doesn’t need to be). With that in mind, I have decided that I will calibrate it to mimic the current insulin settings that I use. To do this I am tinkering with the stepper motor steps and measuring the amount of insulin (I am using water for testing purposes) that is output.
On day three we also had practice presentations with what we have completed so far. Without effectively communicating what you have produced, the technology that you make little impact, so presentation is very important to me. I am now getting more comfortable talking about my project and dialing in the presentation.
Day 5
On day five the network issue has yet to be resolved, however I am meeting again with Eric Yurick on Monday to try and figure it out (thanks Eric!). Until I am able to see how the pump responds to different blood sugar values, I cannot calibrate the pump anymore, so it is back to creating prototypes and testing using the 3D printer. I will update all on the network issues and final designs in next weeks post!
