Blood Sugar Feedback Lamp for Type 1 Diabetics

Odalys Benitez 




My partner has Type 1 diabetes, which means that he's constantly looking at his blood sugar to make sure it's at normal levels, and not rapidly increasing/decreasing.
Through our time together, I have personally seen the toll this can take on him. While I can't necessarily watch his blood sugar for him and give him a break, I decided I wanted to make something that could make the process of observing his blood sugar just a little bit easier.
Normally, his blood sugar is checked on a phone app — but this gets pretty exhausting to always have to context switch to pick up a phone. He tries to keep his blood sugar between 80 and 180 mg/dL — here, it's a little high.


As an artist and engineer, I'm fascinated by the objects that communicate a message via light, sound, music, or movement. I wondered if there was a way to create a medium that could speak for itself, and catch attention, without requiring my partner to remember to check it. While I threw around the idea of automating a speaker to give out blood sugar readings in a robotic voice every 5 minutes, I ultimately decided that a light medium would be best, as it illuminates the room it exists in, and it doesn't majorly interrupt the observer from their thoughts or work.
First Functioning Breadboard Prototype


The lamp consists of an ESP32, WS2812B led strips, logic-level converter, power supply, two buttons, a couple of resistors & capacitors, and a 3-D printed lamp structure (designed by me). I wrote code in C to pull blood sugar readings from a webserver that is populated every 5 minutes, and map blood sugar numerical range values to specific colors. One button turns the lamp on and off, and the other button cycles it through different LED patterns (blood sugar mode, rainbow, twinkle, static color).
Running through different LED patterns! You can see all the electronics in the enclosure.
The LEDs wrapped around the internal column! Makes a very even omnidirectional light source.





The lamp showing blood sugar over the last hour. New data is at the top, so here my partner's blood sugar started high (red), then dropped (orange) until it was in range (blue) and then optimal (green).