Intelligent insulin pump design

Abstract

Diabetes Mellitus is a disease produced by a lack of insulin. In human beings, if insulin is not given externally, glycemia cannot be regulated correctly. According to several studies, tight control of glycemia reduces the chances of developing the ulterior complications of this disease. Automation of insulin infusion is one of the best ways of glycemic control. It is a goal searched from the 70´s when a first device was developed, the Biostator, a PID based automatic insulin infusion apparatus. Nowadays, this device is called "artificial pancreas". It is compound by a glucose sensor, a control algorithm, and an insulin pump infusion. Till now, control algorithms only could control glycemia around a basal value. Therefore, meal ingestion requires a manually added insulin dose called bolus. Our group has developed several control algorithms that automatize the process completely without supplementary bolus requirements. They are based on differential geometric control techniques whose efficiency has been tested in a simulation environment. These techniques are based on feedback linearization and flatness based control. By these techniques, a nonlinear system becomes a linear and controllable one. In this work, a working prototype of insulin infusion pump is introduced to verify the efficacy of the control algorithms proposed.