Today I'd like to introduce you to Ben West. Ben was diagnosed with Diabetes Type 1, at 21 years of age, and if you or any of your friends or loved ones have a similar diagnosis, you are definitely going to learn so much from Ben.

Ben is currently a Staff Product Engineer at Dexcom, a global leader in diabetes care transformation and management, where they design, and manufacture continuous glucose monitoring devices (CGM), and you'll hear a lot more about that technology in today's talk. He spends his time today at Dexcom helping to prioritize where investments in innovation are spent, and which ideas to accelerate into the concept funnel that will yield the most impact for the organization and its customers.

Ben spent the last 5 years, as part of his personal mission to reduce the burden of living with Diabetes Type 1, reverse engineering the open loop system of the insulin pump and has done a tremendous amount of work there, and is also a co-founder of the NightScout Project, an open source cloud based system that provides the availability of CGM information to web browsers, smartphones, and other devices, to help people with the diseases, manage the condition in real time and even predictively based on their bio metrics, activity, and glucose levels. Ben has also spent some time doing engineering work with Tidepool.org, which is a software that is helping to take the DIY capability of addressing both the data on the insulin pump and the data on the CGM, merging this data into a closed loop system, and providing prescriptive suggestions on ongoing therapy. Currently the software is up for approval with the FDA, and is looking to be democratized and provided within app stores for easy consumption. Ben also spent some time as a Cloud Networking Engineer at Cisco, and you'll see some of his experience in these capacities play out in the talk. Ben has a wealth of experience in software engineering and networking all up, and is a very reliable resource to follow and listen to as he discusses some big themes around the value of high fidelity solutions in healthcare.

Some key topics we cover in the talk:

-the journey, the community, and the people that have been working really hard on effectively creating high fidelity therapies to treat Diabetes Type 1

-The definition of creating some high fidelity technology: the ratio of effort and the output of some external good from that effort

-approaching the development of new tech, and some basic philosophies around capitalistic vs open cultures of development and innovation as they pertain to solving important problems

Thank you for listening!

How to contact Ben:

Twitter: @bewestisdoing

[email protected]

Github: bewest

People mentioned:

https://twitter.com/danamlewis

https://twitter.com/loudnate

https://twitter.com/scottleibrand

https://twitter.com/danamlewis

https://twitter.com/AliMazaheri

Helpful resources and items mentioned:

https://www.dexcom.com/

https://peterattiamd.com/kevinsayer/

https://openaps.org/

https://loopkit.github.io/loopdocs/

https://www.tidepool.org/

http://nightscout.github.io/

https://www.tidepool.org/blog/tidepool-loop-medtronic-collaboration

https://professional.diabetes.org/?loc=bb-dorg

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-ai-redefining-manufacturing-wendy-curcuri-bauer/