Artificial Pancreas System With Unannounced Meals Based on a Disturbance Observer and Feedforward Compensation

Abstract

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] This brief is focused on the closed-loop control of postprandial glucose levels of patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus after unannounced meals, which is still a major challenge toward a fully autonomous artificial pancreas. The main limitations are the delays introduced by the subcutaneous insulin pharmacokinetics and the glucose sensor, which typically leads to insulin overdelivery. Current solutions reported in the literature typically resort to meal announcement, which requires patient intervention. In this brief, a disturbance observer (DOB) is used to estimate the effect of unannounced meals, and the insulin pharmacokinetics is taken into account by means of a feedforward compensator. The proposed strategy is validated in silico with the UVa/Padova metabolic simulator. It is demonstrated how the DOB successfully estimates and counteracts not only the effect of meals but also the sudden drops in the glucose levels that may lead to hypoglycemia. For unannounced meals, results show a median time-in-range of 80% in a 30-day scenario with high carbohydrate content and large intrasubject variability. Optionally, users may decide to announce meals. In this case, considering severe bolus mismatch due to carbohydrate counting errors, the median time-in-range is increased up to 88%. In every case, hypoglycemia is avoided.This work was supported in part by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under Grant DPI2016-78831-C2-1-R and in part by the European Union through FEDER Funds.Sanz Diaz, R.; García Gil, PJ.; Diez, J.; Bondía Company, J. (2021). Artificial Pancreas System With Unannounced Meals Based on a Disturbance Observer and Feedforward Compensation. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. 29(1):454-460. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCST.2020.2975147S45446029