Comment by jcims
15 hours ago
mikeselectricstuff on YouTube did a teardown on the Omnipod wearable pump a while back, very cool mechanism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2MQUUkubgs
Insulin is incredibly potent and can easily result in life-altering if not fatal consequences at relatively low ratios of the therapeutic dose, so these things need to be dialed in and extremely reliable.
YouTube teardowns from knowledgeable engineers are a gold mine for learning how real world products are engineered. I always recommend these for early career hardware students and engineers.
What's so wild (and a little disheartening) is that the omnipod is a disposable device. Use it for several days, and throw it out.
This is an extreme corner of quality/cost/reliability optimization. The delivery mechanism has to be extremely repeatable and reliable, it has to fail in safe ways, but at the same time, it has to be cheap enough to throw away.
Durable pumps are all made with very expensive precision mechanisms, lots of metal and high quality plastic.
A friend's coworker had their pump lock on, and inject the entire reservoir of insulin into them. They were discovered in their home by the police after family members lost contact. No idea if it was an Omnipod, but I would hope that all insulin pumps have a separate watchdog circuit to prevent this.
Did they survive?