Control of Blood Glucose for People with Type 1 Diabetes: an in Vivo Study

Since continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) technology and insulin pumps have improved recent years, a strong interest in a closed-loop articial pancreas for people with type 1 diabetes has arisen. Presently, a fully automated controller of blood glucose must face many challenges, such as daily variations of patient's physiology and lack of accuracy of glucose sensors.

In this paper we design and discuss an algorithm for overnight closed-loop control of blood glucose in people with type 1 diabetes. The algorithm is based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). We use an oset-free autoregressive model with exogenous input and moving average (ARMAX) to model the patient.

Observer design and a time-varying glucose reference signal improve robustness of the algorithm. We test the algorithm in two clinical studies conducted at Hvidovre Hospital. The rst study took place overnight, and the second one took place during daytime. These trials demonstrate the importance of observer design in ARMAX models and show the possibility of stabilizing blood glucose during the night.