User:Mbbradford

My name is Malcolm Bradford, but my friends call me Bruce.

I studied biomedical engineering at Boston University and received my Bachelors degree in 1983. However, I never worked in that field. Instead I have been a defense systems engineer for most of my career, except for a few years when I was an automotive engineer. I live in the Detroit area, so that was inevitable. As a systems engineer I am skilled at evaluating complex systems, capturing software requirements, predicting performance via modeling and simulation before the system is realized, as well as integration of the real-time software with hardware and performing validation and verification testing.

At GM, I gained experience using adaptive variables as part of a control system for electric vehicle batteries. This made it possible for the software to "learn" the behavior of individual battery packs, optimizing their charging and use.

A few years later my son Andrew was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. My biomedical education became very helpful as I was led down the path by some very good CDE's at Children's Hospital of Michigan to learn what our family needed to know to care for our son. There are many excellent books and support groups that extended that training, and a few years of practical experience with MDI and insulin pumps and football season completed the training. I am not a CDE but I dare to consider myself an expert at diabetes care (not perfect perhaps, as I have made every mistake in the books and learned from those also).

It's a bit eerie how circumstances in my life have brought me to this point. I just happen to be a person with the combined background in diabetes care and insulin pump use, controls background with feedback systems and real-time embedded controls, systems engineering background in requirements generation and functional decomposition, and with the ability to model and simulate the resulting algorithm. I can see clearly how to close the loop between the pump and the CGMS using control system theory and adaptive variables. I can see how adaptive variables will make the difference between the poor approaches in research now that will require future improved continuous blood glucose sensors compared to an adaptive algorithm that will be effective with the sensors we already have. I am prepared to do it all completely by myself, but I know that it will take an unnecessarily long time and would suffer a lack of scientific value without collaboration and peer review.

None the less I am motivated to start this project and see it through. Regardless of knowing the right amount of insulin to deliver, there is a practical gap between what we know and what we actually do. Learning what is the right thing to do in a given situation is a challenge. Teaching it to those who actually have to do it is a greater challenge. Keeping up the tasks consistently day in and day out, however, has become the greatest challenge of all. Can I expect my son to do that? How can any CDE expect their patients to go out there after diagnosis and do what is needed day in and day out? If you have ever argued with your young child for the millionth time to brush their teeth at bedtime, and they lied to you about having done it, and you check their toothbrush to see if its wet and show them a dry toothbrush as proof you know they lied, and the next day they wet their toothbrush in the sink before lying to you about brushing their teeth ... then you are able to understand my motivation to create the software control for an insulin pump that will provide expert diabetes care on an automatic level someday, and at the semi-automatic level right now.

You can read more about my motivation at A Parent's Story.

This project is an attempt to assemble a volunteer team to perform the task of developing and validating a powerful adaptive artificial pancreas algorithm, encompassing both present and future applications. I want to do it here in the public domain, both to attract a peer group but also to assure that this contribution to knowledge will have no ability to become restricted by a patent or copyright or intellectual property rights what so ever.

Please join me in this project.

I am also a "Wikipedian." You can learn more about me at my wikipedia user page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mbbradford