For the love of Joe Garmon

This is Joe Garmon (on the left). We love Joe.

Joe is working on his PhD research at the University of Central Florida. His thesis will be “An Algorithmic Model for Tuning of Insulin Pump Control Parameters.” Joe is using big data mining and multidimensional statistical analysis techniques to come up with better pump settings like insulin sensitivity and correction factors, as well as a user-specific insulin-on-board model.

Joe has Type 1 Diabetes. Joe also has hypoglycemic unawareness. He once sat in his doctor’s office with a BG below 30, without any symptoms. His doctor simply couldn’t believe it, and kept checking Joe’s BG with different meters. Finally, he was convinced and agreed to put Joe on a CGM.

After one too many visits from the paramedics (five in one year!) for hypo events, Joe decided that enough was enough. He said “There must be a better way!” and decided to use his skills, and diabetes big data, to make a difference. #WeAreNotWaiting.

(By the way… did we mention that Joe is working on his PhD at night while he holds down a day job preparing risk assessment programs for critical infrastructure programs? Perhaps we can convince Joe to get involved in Artificial Pancreas development when he’s done with his PhD…)

Finally, and we’d still love Joe even without this, we love Joe because he was our very first public donor. We didn’t even ask. One day, a check from Joe just showed up along with a friendly note in support of Tidepool.

Thank you, Joe! We couldn’t do what we are doing at Tidepool without the generous support of people like you. We sure hope that we can help your research efforts soon with an anonymized research database based on data donated to the Tidepool Platform.

Thanks!Howard and The Entire Tidepool Team