The end of prototyping… for now
Yesterday, we reached the pinnacle of what we could achieve in our limited amount of time. After running our second prototype past our patient, they provided us with potential additional features that a user would want on the finished device, and we delivered.
Our first point that we wanted to address was the alerting mechanism. Our second prototype had only an LED to alert the user that the insulin was pooling. Since the insertion site of the pump would be under clothing, a less visual method of alerting would be desirable. A few quick edits to our code and circuit added a vibrating motor which activated when the circuit was completed with insulin. We kept the LED as well, because Neeraj noted that the FDA requires a visual and physical alert system in this sort of device.
Secondly, our patient expressed a desire to turn off the alert if they were in public and did not want to go through the hassle of changing the insertion site at the moment when they were alerted. This turned out to be a little bit more involved than the first point that we addressed, but with some clever wiring and coding, we added a non-momentary switch to our circuit that would turn off the light and motor when activated.
We have plenty of ideas for our device in the future, but this seems to be a smart stopping point in terms of prototyping. Our device does what we originally set out to do, which is detect insulin and alert the user. That seems pretty successful to me
-Dan
BME Design 