T1D Assistant
Overview
T1D Assistant is a long-term personal project that helps me manage Type 1 Diabetes through data and conversation. It began when I vented to ChatGPT about not being able to enjoy a bagel without wrecking my blood sugars. It turned into a way to share mistakes and find the patterns so I could make a plan for treatment without judgment. Diabetes is physical and also deeply emotional. Right now it is very common for people turn to AI chatbots in emotional situations because of its unjudgmental programming and knowledge of a variety of topics. I was surprised by how much ChatGPT knew about T1D management, and also by how much it got very wrong.
To help correct this I set up my own model that runs locally using Open WebUI with the Qwen3 language model. It lets me log meals, activity, insulin doses, and symptoms, then talk through what happened in a conversational way. It supports the day to day care an endocrinologist cannot be there for like emotional regulation and daily troubleshooting.
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Process
- Built on a self-hosted setup using Qwen3 and Open WebUI
- Created a structured input system to record meals, insulin doses, timing, and outcomes
- Developed conversational flows for reflecting on poor outcomes (e.g. high post-meal spikes) and finding actionable tweaks
- Explored parsing visual medical charts (PDFs) into readable data for the model
- Identified and filtered out unsafe AI-generated suggestions (e.g. drastic basal changes), reinforcing the importance of patient experience over model confidence
- Used ChatGPT as a secondary interpreter and translator for visual chart data
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Use Case
The assistant helps me process things like:
- Why a bagel didn't work that morning
- What I could do differently next time
- When to adjust a correction dose or timing
- How to not feel shame around imperfect control
- Walk through in real time how to treat for a bagel next time
This project is ongoing. There are so many elements that can be added, like a carb calculator that allows you to take a picture of a meal and have guidance for how much to bolus, when, and what you should do afterwards to make sure that meal puts the body through the least amount of stress. I hope to shape this into something that others with Type 1 Diabetes can use. A local companion for a condition that's complex and constant.