CHoKI-based MPC for blood glucose regulation in Artificial Pancreas

This work presents a Model Predictive Control (MPC) for the artificial pancreas, which is able to autonomously manage basal insulin injections in type 1 diabetic patients. Specifically, the MPC goal is to maintain the patients’ blood glucose level inside the safe range of 70-180 mg/dL, acting on the insulin amount and respecting all the imposed constraints, taking into consideration also the Insulin On Board (IOB), to avoid excess of insulin infusion. MPC uses a model to make predictions of the system behavior. In this work, due to the complexity of the diabetes disease that complicates the identification of a general physiological model, a data-driven learning method is employed instead. The Componentwise Hölder Kinky Inference (CHoKI) method is adopted, to have a customized controller for each patient. For the data collection phase and also to test the proposed controller, the virtual patients of the FDA-accepted UVA/Padova simulator are exploited. The MPC is also tested on simulations with variability of the insulin sensitivity and with physical activity sessions. The final results are satisfying since the proposed controller is conservative and reduces the time in hypoglycemia (which is more dangerous) if compared to the outcomes obtained without the IOB constraints.