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Permalink Reply by Kristin on January 18, 2011 at 10:53pm

There is more info about how the different pumps calculate insulin on board in the power point presentation HERE. I'm not sure if they include the formula or not though.

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Permalink Reply by Brian (bsc) on January 19, 2011 at 5:08am

In Walsh's book, Using Insulin, I beleive he quotes the figure that for Humalog/Novolog 20% of the insulin will be used in each hour after it is given. For R (Regular), he uses the figure of 16%. Insulin pumps use a more complicated calculation that takes into account more of the actual curve of the profile, and you will be hard pressed to duplicate that yourself. If you want a rough estimate, use the 20% rule, but as JohnG notes, it won't be comparable to what you wizard tells you and if you have multiple stacking it is complicated.

I suppose the real question is why are you concerned? Do you not trust it? Have you been getting bad results? Are some of your settings wrong?

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Permalink Reply by Kristin on January 19, 2011 at 6:18am

The Paradigm (and earlier) MM pump does not let you view the amount of active insulin without entering a blood sugar reading. Other pumps (including now the MM Revel) allow you to just view this number. I used to use the Cozmo and I would just check the amount of active insulin in me before making decisions about activity (exercise) or just to know. I miss that feature on the MM Paradigm.

One thing that I do is enter "false" blood sugars just to be able to view the active insulin level even if I don't need to check my blood sugar then. I chose a number (for me it is 4.0, which is the default value as it is set as my target) and I enter that whenever I want to get an active insulin reading. If my blood sugar is ACTUALLY 4.0, then I enter 3.9 or 4.1. That way when reviewing the logs downloaded from my pump, then I just ignore all entries with the exact level of 4.0.

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Permalink Reply by Damon on January 19, 2011 at 6:44am

The reason I'm curious about a formula is I'm developing an application for visualizing/manipulating all my uploaded CSV data from the pump, and I think having a visual representation of the amount of active insulin on a graph or something would be really handy for immediately assessing things.

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Permalink Reply by dep on January 21, 2011 at 12:21pm

Why not try calling MM and asking them?

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