TEDx on a Bionic Pancreas
ENG's Ed Damiano's portable device aims to help diabetics
Ed Damiano, a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering, gave a TEDx talk in June about his race to develop a bionic pancreas before his teenage son, David, who has type 1 diabetes, goes off to college. Damiano’s wearable, pocket-sized device, which is now in clinical trials, uses a smartphone hardwired to a continuous glucose monitor and two pumps that automatically deliver doses of insulin or glucagon. Damiano tells the story of how his wife, who is a pediatrician, diagnosed David’s type 1 diabetes when the boy was just 11 months old. Watching his wife curl herself protectively around David in his hospital bed in the ICU that night, Damiano says, “I began to think of a way in which I might be able to build a technology that could automatically take care of David’s blood sugar levels so he wouldn’t have to.”
A version of this article originally appeared on BU Research.
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