It is not a zero sum game. Not having this control over the pump can also kill you, because the systems that were available before this movement got started were so poor.
When the hacker community started putting together remote monitoring systems for the CGMs that allowed, e.g. parents to watch their kids at school, or through the night from the next room, that improved quality of life and maybe even saved lives.
Hackers have already tapped into the Medtronic pump to build the world’s first closed loop system. The OnniPod is just another pump in line to be reverse engineered.
If you saw first hand the quality of software being put out by Dexcom and Insulet, this work is serving as an important check&balance as well as pushing them to invest in R&D versus sitting back and milking their patents.
It’s also worth noting that the pod has important hardware safeguards that mitigate the impact of a software error on the remote control side. You can’t just send a message asking for 100 units of insulin because the hardware won’t dose it. You can also hear (and somewhat feel) each 0.05 unit of insulin being delivered as a click about once every 1.5 seconds.
And again I’ll reiterate that it’s not a zero sum game. The software and UI is so bad on the Insulet/Omnipod side that it’s easy to screw up a basal program, or when applying a temp basal on top of an extended bolus, or when changing a pod while an extended bolus is active. All these events can result in low blood sugar events that are potentially dangerous.
Efforts like Nightscout have actually saved lives and while they are not without risk (what thing worth doing is?), the T1D world has been measurably improved because of their efforts.
Finally I’ll says that the reverse engineering effort already uncovered one significant bug in the protocol that we know of. They didn’t delve into the details of the “nonce” but I’m willing to bet that imaging the chip was not actually necessary and that the “encryption” is some homebrew POS which is highly insecure. We deserve to know the protocol which is protecting the communication between the pod and the controller, for example is there a secure DH key exchange happening when a new pod is paired and initialized? Can a third-party controller potentially spoof commands to my kids’ pods? OmniPod would never disclose how this works, so I’m supppsed to just trust them.
Most of them are already well acquainted with manually managing insulin and the existing products and can handle any mishaps for the most part.
Operating margin is still negative, but it's improved tremendously year over year.
Thank you for your reply. This is what angers me the most. They drug companies have a solution. Keep buying insulin, keep buying needles, keep buying new pods, sensors, and apps. No, this can be fixed, it can be better.
It's the most trivial thing. Copy a public domain CRC16 routine, add a unit test with a test vector.
It certainly slowed down the reverse engineers. If they didn’t get to the object code what would the next step have been? Cryptographic analysis?
Imagine the other version of this story, where an advanced attacker does all of this, because "Prominent Political Figure X" wears this insulin pump...
If you have type 1 diabetes hacked insulin pumps or otherwise, the disease will kill you prematurely. It's a question of "when" rather than "if". Mostly this is because the disease requires constant attention - attention of the sort humans aren't good at providing, even if their life depends on it. Listen to this talk about OpenAPS. See where she says so has to wake up on average 200 times a month - or any 6 times a night, every night, regardless of whether she's pulled at 24hr day or had a good night out to monitor her levels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p76hGxv3-HE
While there is a cost advantage as the talk makes plain this isn't what motivated them. Their hashtag spells out the motivation: #WeAreNotWaiting. Waiting means a chance of dying. A capitalist system that has to be tightly constrained by government regulation to prevent it from killing too many people turned out to be far slower than open source doing the same thing.
Again, listen to the talk. Listen to the lengths the people who use OpenAPS went to make sure their novel devices didn't kill them. Learn how they voluntary pooled millions of device hours of data, and made it open available so they could all learn from it. Unlike you, I'd trust OpenAPS firmware long before I trusted some closed source solution on the promise that "we are making money from it - trust us". Thanks all the same, but I'll prefer to trust the people who would be killed by it if they get it wrong.