Hello World! New Member Introduction

[abram]

Hello everyone!
My name is Abram and I’m from Egypt. Like many of you around here, I’m obsessed with robots :]]]

I’ve studied biomedical engineering and during the last two years, I became interested in embedded systems and C programming. I’m also interested in prosthetic limbs and robotic surgery

My graduation project was an artificial pancreas! An external device that consisted of a continuous glucose monitoring sensor that measures blood glucose and send the readings to a microcontroller which runs a control algorithm that determines the right insulin dose to be pumped using a 3D-printed but relatively large insulin pump.

My favorite shows are the The 100, Game of Thrones and Westworld (so yeah, I’m pro-conscious AI )

I’m glad that I found a community that shares the same interests and I look forward to hearing all about your exciting projects!

[geraldinebc15]

Hi @abram and welcome to the forum!

An artificial pancreas? That sounds amazing, I hope you share more about that project here.

Yes! I’m a big fan of Westworld too haha, I binge-watched the last season recently, definitely makes you go #teamrobots instead of #teamhumans, at least most of the time . I was a fan of GOT as well, too bad it ended already, but HBO is working in some spin-offs so that’s great haha.

I’m glad we have a new member in the community and even better someone with your knowledge.

Hope to see you around often

[igor_X]

Welcome @abram

Your graduation project sounds terrific We would like to hear and see more of it

[abram]

@geraldinebc15 @igor_X
Thank you all! can’t wait for season 3

About the project, I know it sounds fancy but it really is a simple device

Here’s a block diagram of its basic principle. It is a simple closed loop system.

We didn’t want to use an invasive glucose sensor so, we went for a less-accurate non-invasive one that uses IR to detect blood glucose.

As for the insulin pump, we tried different options:
The first one was a car windshield washer pump

The second was a 3D-printed gear pump:

But these two had a very high flow rate and suffered an air leaking problem.

So we settled for the extremely accurate but gigantic 3D-printed syringe pump

This was just a prototype and we only tested on ourselves (even though we’re not diabetic patients)
But it was a good project and we learned a lot of new cool stuff.

[igor_X]

Hey @abram,

It looks simple but smart. Generally, simple solutions for complicated problems are always the best solutions

[geraldinebc15]

@abram yeah! I can’t wait for it either

Even better if it is simple! as long as it works it is great haha.

I didn’t know that you could use IR to detect blood glucose, studying biomedical engineering must be fascinating, I hope you share more of the interesting things you’ve learned here

[abram]

@igor_X True!

@geraldinebc15 It was actually Near Infrared and the method was explained in this paper. But it wasn’t very accurate and therefore not quite reliable for real-life use.

And yes, sometimes it was interesting but most of the time, it was just complicated and frustrating

[geraldinebc15]

Oh I see, it is still pretty cool haha

I don’t remember having done any cool project that didn’t frustrate me at some point haha, so yeah it is not always easy but when you finally see it working it feels awesome

[abram]

@geraldinebc15 Exactly!