Description

Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) is a chronic metabolic disease caused by the lack of insulin production in pancreatic beta cells. It affects approximately 35 million individuals worldwide and causes immediate life-threatening consequences such as hypoglycemia and ketoacidosis, and long-term complications, such as cardiovascular disease, nephropathy, neuropathy, and retinopathy. T1DM can be managed through exogenous insulin by regulating the blood glucose level in clinically acceptable range with the help of a control system, which is known the artificial pancreas. The idea of an artificial pancreas was considered within the scientific community for more than thirty years. Early closed-loop concept consisted of an insulin syringe, a blood glucose analyzer, and a transmitter. In the recent years, with the development of subcutaneous continuous glucose monitoring sensors, and the hardware to communicate with insulin delivery pumps, the vision of closed-loop control of blood glucose is approaching a reality. However, still there are many more hurdles that we have to overcome. Basically, uncertain physiological characteristics of the patients, and time-varying delays associated with both actuators and sensors, (in this case, insulin pumps and glucose sensors) are major challenges for an artificial pancreas design. Its performance has to compromise between robustness and uncertainty. This leads to an interesting control problem, which we tackle with zone model predictive control combined with safety constraints that attempt to prevent insulin overdose. In this talk, I will focus on the current state of the artificial pancreas design and its future expansions.