Day 4 (published 4 December 2020)

SETTINGS

  • What is different from my current pump and Loop

  • How do I prepare for Loop settings???

Settings are very important! Loop does math every 5 minutes to make decisions on raising, lowering, delivering a micro bolus, suspending delivery of insulin and more. If your settings are not right, Loop will be making the wrong decisions.

Most people move to loop assuming they can just transfer their settings from their PDM. Usually their basal rate is off, either because the extra basal is used to cover meal portions (fat/protein), small snacks that aren’t entered and other reasons.

Also, I am sure you think the DIA or Duration of Insulin Action for whatever insulin you are using is 3 hours or 3.5 hours. It is not. Trust me, it really is not. Traditional pump therapy accounts for the first 80% to 85% of the DIA, then ignores the tail, it gets soaked up with the snack you forgot to enter or the fat/protein you didn’t account for.

Since your current settings are probably based on a DIA of around 3 hours, that throws off all your other settings. So, please, take the time to read the docs, do the testing, and once you switch to loop, test, test, test again until you get correct results from Loop. Do NOT use the Walsh model to change your DIA to a shorter time, you will fail to get good results with looping.

See this reference on DIA: Confusion Regarding Duration of Insulin Action, A Potential Source for Major Insulin Dose Errors by Bolus Calculators

The best references for getting prepared with your settings is this Loopdocs page.

Loopdocs will point you to Looptips, where you should read and thoroughly understand these pages

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