At her endo appointment last week, my daughter decided to give Omnipod 5 a try. She has been Looping for 3.5 years on Eros originally and Dash since February. She plays field hockey and one of the most challenging parts of Loop is being disconnected every day while on the field for practice and games. I am hopeful that the pod communicating with the cgm during this time will be a huge benefit for her.
Another benefit I am hoping for with Omnipod 5 is the simplicity of settings. She is about a year from being an adult and the complexity of constantly evaluating data to adjust Loop settings could be overly complicated as she becomes more and more independent. My hope is that the simplicity of Omnipod 5 as a learning system means she only has to worry about a few settings and can focus more on the key aspects of management such as timing of boluses and when to take a correction.
I'll be documenting the differences, pros, and cons of Omnipod 5 when coming from Loop. She had an A1C last week of 5.9, so we'll see how Omnipod 5 compares. The things I'm most curious about other than the basics are:
- comparison to rebound and extended lows when Loop wants to dose too aggressively at the lower end
- Does it handle stuck on high times better than Loop since it is not a carb-tracking algorithm
- Do Activity mode and higher targets work similarly to overrides
- Should corrections during learning be done similarly to super-bolusing in Loop: when you dose the correction plus borrowed future basal because the system will shut off basal after the dose