The Open Artificial Pancreas System project (#OpenAPS) is an open and transparent effort to make safe and effective basic Artificial Pancreas System (APS) technology widely available to more quickly improve and save as many lives as possible and reduce the burden of Type 1 diabetes.
OpenAPS means basic overnight closed loop APS technology is more widely available to anyone with compatible medical devices who is willing to build their own system.
We believe that we can make safe and effective APS technology available more quickly, to more people, rather than just waiting for current APS efforts to complete clinical trials and be FDA-approved and commercialized through traditional processes. And in the process, we believe we can engage the untapped potential of dozens or possibly hundreds of patient innovators and independent researchers and also make APS technology available to hundreds or thousands of people willing to participate as subjects in clinical trials.
The body of work by the OpenAPS community includes a safety-focused reference design, an open source reference implementation, and documentation that can be used by any individual – or any medical device manufacturer. We believe this will in turn allow manufacturers (and the academic research teams they work with) to turn more of their attention to designing and testing more advanced APS systems, and thereby accelerate the pace of innovation toward new and improved Type 1 diabetes treatments, and eventually a cure.
Please note that OpenAPS community efforts will be open source and free for use for other people, open source projects, researchers, and non-profits to use, and available on an open and non-discriminatory basis for all commercial manufacturers to use in proprietary products if desired.