There was a lot of talk about co-designing diabetes health systems with patients at #HIC18 and I was pleased to see a session on consumer co-design scheduled at the Australian Diabetes Congress (August 22-24) in Adelaide.

Renza Scibilia T1 consumer voice at Diabetes Australia was one of the chairs in the Australian workshop on co-design

I was not able to attend the conference but I’m sure the main messages were summed up by this slide:

ConsumerCoDesignAtADC

User experience design for medical devices

I was even more thrilled a few months ago to see BigfootBiomedical advertising for user experience professionals to join its company. Doing proper ethnographic/observational studies of people actually using medical devices is imperative and I get the feeling it has been overlooked by some companies in the past.

With more vendors coming into the market with their versions of hybrid closed loop technology for diabetes in the imminent future, having good usability and the least possible diabetes burden may well determine which companies survive and thrive in the new marketplace.

It will also be interesting to see how companies that choose to embrace JDRF’s call for open protocols fare in the marketplace too. Interoperability, open source, community… perhaps a whole new health ecosystem? Who knows?

One thing for sure is, from my perspective, it’s going to be fascinating.

Now, back to the ADC co-design workshop. Other presenters in this workshop include:

KirstineBell — Kirstine Bell, dietician, diabetes educator and researcher

FrankSita — Frank Sita T1D blogger at Type1Writes

MelindaSeed — Melinda Seed T1D blogger and advocate at twicediabetes.com

… and diabetes educator/pharmacist Theresa Di Franco from Perth Diabetes Care

DIY hybrid closed looping

Another brilliant presentation at the Australian Diabetes Congress was Renza Scibilia, Cheryl Steele and David Burren’s talk on using DIY hybrid closed loop systems.

Renza uses Loop and talks about what this tech has meant to her, David uses Android APS and gives an overview of the technology and Cheryl uses OpenAPS and shows how Nightscout reports can be used by health care professionals. At the end of the presentation, CEO of Diabetes Australia, Greg Johnson, launches the Diabetes Australia position statement on DIY looping.

You can see a recording of the presentation here on Youtube.