January 5, 2016
Somehow my first post ended up on a new website instead of linked here. See original here.
Copy of text:
The interview process today was very illuminating. I came in not having any idea what living with the conditions that the patients are living with was like. The constant care that they have to take in order to remain active seems like a very difficult, and likely mentally exhausting, task. This provided some perspective on why I became interested in embedded systems applications in the medical sphere in the first place.
One of the most interesting insights that seems obvious when said but did not initially occur to me was that the monitoring equipment is invasive. It comes with a whole host of side effects such as rashes and calluses. The devices can be cumbersome and risky, resulting in people not wanting to always use them. One of the patients stated that for diabetes, the patient could take better care of himself or herself when using shots instead of insulin pumps. This seems to indicate the need for a noninvasive method by which to measure blood glucose, or at the very least a noninvasive way by which to indicate whether blood glucose has crossed a high/low threshold that requires intervention to prevent a bad reaction.
-Neeraj
BME Design 