Mobile health devices are in demand, but they are not keeping up with what consumers want. The Wall Street Journal reports that patients and their caregivers are now making the devices they need by hacking what is already in the marketplace.
This sort of at-home tinkering has the FDA and device makers a little wary because none of the changes are officially sanctioned, but efforts like NightScout, in which parents of diabetic children hacked a glucose monitoring device so it would upload information to the Internet, should not be a surprise: the WSJ notes that MIT has been hosting medical device hackathons for a while and that patients have also been making small and large changes on their own.
Some patient DIY examples: making it possible for hearing aids to play music or making their own tools to measure esophageal acid levels.
