Mac engineers making insulin pumps safer

[Northerner]

An alarming number of malfunctioning infusion pumps that deliver medicine like insulin have led McMaster engineers to start creating new software to make them safer.

Software issues are one of the problems identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as compromising the safety of the pumps, leading to over or under dosing, missed treatments or delayed therapy. There are about 50,000 incidents involving external infusion pumps every year in the United States.

http://www.thespec.com/news/local/article/842296--mac-engineers-making-insulin-pumps-safer

Thought they meant Apple Mac engineers at first! 🙂

 

[Pumper_Sue]

An alarming number of malfunctioning infusion pumps that deliver medicine like insulin have led McMaster engineers to start creating new software to make them safer.

Software issues are one of the problems identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as compromising the safety of the pumps, leading to over or under dosing, missed treatments or delayed therapy. There are about 50,000 incidents involving external infusion pumps every year in the United States.

http://www.thespec.com/news/local/article/842296--mac-engineers-making-insulin-pumps-safer

Thought they meant Apple Mac engineers at first! 🙂

50,000 incidents that's one heck of a lot 😱

 

[Northerner]

50,000 incidents that's one heck of a lot 😱

Yes, although I think there at least a couple of million T1s in the US and a large percentage seem to have pumps, so maybe it's a relatively small number of problems - or even one really bad pump! 😉

 

[trophywench]

That's SCAREY.

I mean good someone is trying to do summat about it - but we (on other DSF) had a couple of people had terrible over-dosing experiences with one partic pump a couple of years ago and they were both taken seriously by their respective hospitals and the manufacturer; and we didn't think either of em would make it up in the first place anyway as they were both trusted members. In fact the second one didn't even know about the first - was before we had a 'robust' pumping section.

aaaarrgghh.