BioCoder #2

Superseding Institutions in Science and Medicine

Anthony Di Franco

Recently, on a mailing list about open source medical devices, Damon Muma asked the following question: “I am feeling the urge to contribute to this movement, but I’m a bit lost on what has been done/tried/planned or what would be effective and useful. Worried that efforts would be duplicating others or not usefully focused. I’ve had random friends who aren’t even diabetic but into coding offer to help but wasn’t sure what to point them at.”

My response began with some fairly concrete observations based on my experiences as a type I diabetic, but it grew to encompass more fundamental issues I know about as a person with an academic background in systems/control theory who works with machine learning techniques as a programmer. I wanted to share those observations here as a way to provoke thought on these questions and broaden the discussion.

Security in Medical Devices

In 2011, the tragically late Barnaby Jack invited me to share the stage with him a couple times to help him present his insulin pump hacks, where he demonstrated the near-total lack of security in insulin pumps, permitting remote control of all functions with no prior knowledge about an individual pump. He moved on to similar work with pacemakers. I was very much looking forward to his work putting pressure on manufacturers to secure their products, and more broadly to improve their quality standards and innovate a bit in their products’ function to produce ...