Health hackers: Patients taking medical innovation into their own hands

As a Type 1 diabetic I've been watching these hackers with interest. There's clearly some great opportunities for linking continuous glucose monitoring and insulin pumps, particularly for young children. Compared to old-school closed medical devices it looks like we might get much more data and much more control over what's going on.

But it's easy to see why the commercial companies haven't produced this yet. If a bug in this means you get too much insulin then you'll end up passing out and it could kill you within a really short length of time.

I spoke to one of my doctors about it and he seemed slightly scared at what these people are trying. There have been doctors researching this for years in carefully controlled trials, and now there are hundreds of people just plugging together phones and trying it out for themselves.

I'm wondering about the term "hacking" here. Anything else than mere monitoring would seem extremely stupid. Common wisdom has that you don't ever hack on a production system, much less so a critical, life-sustaining one.

Of course, improved monitoring is not bad, but is it really "health hacking"?

> although they don’t admit genuine hackers such as Omer

I wonder what this means, and what has happened to make the reporter say this.