Beyond Classroom Walls Header
Personal tools
You are here: Home > Stories > Time for Change

Time for Change

Filed under: , ,
Mary Anne DeZur and her son Lou, who has juvenile diabetes, invented Time for Change, a device that could help make lives easier for people with diabetes. DeZur is the Office Manager of Facilities Management at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Time for Change

Mary Anne DeZur with her invention Time for Change



Time for Change photo
Time for Change:
The time tracker for diabetics is invented by Mary Anne DeZur, Office Manager of Facilities Management at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. (photo by Shawn McAfee of UW Oshkosh Learning Technologies.)

by Noell Dickmann
Student multimedia reporter

When Mary Anne Dezur’s son Lou was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, she had little knowledge about the lifelong chronic disease that affects children and young adults. To regulate his sugar levels, Lou, then 14, had to be given insulin shots three times a day, every day. Like any good parent, DeZur, who is the Office Manager of Facilities Management at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, worried about her son's health.

In 2008 Lou started using an insulin pump, which works by delivering insulin to the body through a small tube that feeds into a needle placed under the skin. The insulin pump requires Lou to change where the needle is placed in his body every three days to prevent infection and calluses. With Lou living the busy life of a teenager, the family struggled to remember when to change the site. As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of all invention,” and their frustration led the mother-son duo to invent a timer to keep track of the days when the infusion site needs to be changed. The device, as named by Lou, is called Time For Change.

DeZur felt that Time for Change could help other families with diabetics and others who need to take medication on a schedule. She entered the invention in Walmart’s “Get On The Shelf” contest in hopes of getting it to market. The contest consists of voting for a product over a series of rounds. The winner will have their product sold in Walmart stores all over the country, and the runners-up will sell their products on the Walmart website. Time For Change is competing against 4,000 contestants.

The first round of voting is from March 7-April 3, 2012. Ten winners of the round will then proceed to the final round of voting from April 11-24, 2012.

“This is so incredibly important to me, not only to make my son’s life a little easier, but also to bring this invention to other diabetics,” says DeZur, who added that if Time For Change goes to market, she and Lou, who is now 21, will donate a portion of the sales to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

To support Time For Change, please visit http://www.getontheshelf.com/product/3623/TIME-FOR-CHANGE or to access the Facebook fan page, visit www.facebook.com/JustLikeLou.

In this audio-only podcast, student multimedia reporter Noell Dickmann talks with Mary Anne DeZur about the story behind Time For Change and its potential to impact the diabetes community.

 

Filed under: , ,