Exploring Potential of Glucose Monitor Interface on Hackaday's Hardware Front. Unveiling Open Insulin Project with Tiny OLED and Camera Hacks.

If you deal with diabetes, you probably know how to prick your finger and use a little meter to read your glucose levels. The meters get better and better which mostly means they take less blood, so then they actually hurt less to use. But the way they display the information hasn't changed much over the years. And while that works, it's pretty archaic compared to what we carry in our pockets these days. So why not update the interface on the little meters?

Exploring the potential of a Glucose Monitor Interface

This is what Link: Hackaday has started to do on the hardware front. They found a discussion by Link: Eve Marquis about building an open-source Open Insulin project and started hacking on the glucose monitors she was using. The original project started by hacking the Freestyle Precision Neo, which they have lots of because it talks to the Open Insulin hardware. It uses tiny coins-cell batteries and we know this is not going to power a Raspberry Pi style LCD and camera setup.

Knowing the team at Freestyle and seeing a few commonalities, we decided to pull one apart and see if we could hack a tiny OLED and a small camera. This could allow for a lot more information to be displayed besides just nutty numbers. This is the crux of the project now, getting data we want onto the device. There are three of us who have one in an increasing state of disrepair.

Reverse Engineering the Monitor's Software

The software seems to be "read only." That is the way to say it. We turn it on we get sugar readings. We can't add to those. Looking at the software we are running and very likely a year behind the times. So we either want to run a job that allows for hacking easier or an emulator or both. There are a few Python scripts to export the data when the device is connected to a computer by USB, so we believe it can be hacked. They are very low-level.Read the full story

So their plan is to use them to break down communication to and from the device as well as take them on the road to poke at what they find there. They've taken two devices already to pieces, and I'm talking dead, and are in the process of wondering how to get them apart.

Enhancing the Feedback Mechanism

If you wanted to stop anyone from hacking your device, the open USB API is the way to thwart that. We think our devices are securely behind a USB API. This is not to say it would not be useful to have more than one API to Access glucose monitor data so we can remove just our data. It's just that we are thinking a lot about data security and the like. The Freestyle Libre needs a special device to get the data from it, a device we are putting in our system. The next step here is to get that communicating.

Though we have a lot of tools, we do not have access to the tools necessary to do this ourselves. And we don't know if it is even possible to do it without the computer we need. We are thinking right now more about what we are doing and how to make it work. We know we need an emulator for our phone connector but it's with our tool and there is no way to use a tool that we don't have.

Future Potential and Collaborations

When you mess with something that People depend on, you are affecting their quality of life in a way that is personal. When you take a project that doesn't run as well as it could and start hacking on that to make it better, you are improving someone's quality of life. That is the cool thing about this project. It started off as an experiment, got a lot of press, and now it feels like the groundwork for a new start. People have noticed what it is and are interested in joining forces. A lot of people who might not otherwise didn't get this project get the importance of open source. We now have HD cameras, a sponsor offering free medical devices, and a team of experts is growing.

The hope is that the project will be able to offer not just the hardware, but the software for people like Eve. It looks like people will be making their own hardware to go along with the software. This is an exciting new place for the project to go.