Artificial pancreas: glycemic control strategies for avoiding hypoglycemia

Abstract

This paper examines the performance of two new closed-loop control strategies developed as part of the Artificial Pancreas project, this being the most promising treatment for type 1 diabetes mellitus. The first strategy uses a new version of the well-known proportional, integral and derivative control, developed to respect state and input positivity constraints. The second is a new formulation of model-based predictive control with an impulsive input. The strategies’ performance is evaluated with 50 virtual patients taken from the literature and the UVa/Padova metabolic simulator, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Also, a robustness analysis is added to evaluate the strategies under the parametric variations of the most important physiological parameters. The results show that both strategies have a good performance with low to moderate plant-model mismatch.