Implications of Meal Library & Meal Detection to Glycemic Control of Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus through MPC Control

Abstract

Recent technological progress in insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors (CGM) are enabling development of an artificial β-cell that will allow superior glycemic control for patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). A control algorithm that is implemented in such system will need to regulate basal insulin as well as to reject unmeasured disturbances, such as meals. A traditional approach is to combine feed-forward control as a means to overcome meal disturbances, where the user informs the controller on a meal and estimates the size of that together with PID control or Model Predictive Control (MPC) to address the regulation problem. This approach fails with T1DM adolescents and children because they often forget to give a pre-meal bolus and are poor at estimating meal sizes. A novel approach to overcome this problem is suggested in this paper by the combination of a meal library and a meal detection algorithm in the framework of Model Predictive Control (MPC). In this work, the challenging problem of an unannounced mixed meal is being addressed using this novel combination.