An Adaptive Disturbance Rejection Controller for Artificial Pancreas

Artificial pancreas (AP) systems are designed to automate glucose management for patients with type 1 diabetes. In this work, we propose an adaptive disturbance rejection control approach for AP systems to achieve safe and effective glucose regulation. The controller is built within the framework of active disturbance rejection control, but incorporates safety operation constraints, and glucose- and velocity-dependent parameter adaptation modules for the key control parameters. In silico performance comparison between the proposed controller and an adaptive zone model predictive controller (MPC) (Shi, Dassau, and Doyle III, 2019a) is conducted on the 10-adult cohort of the FDA-accepted UVA/Padova T1DM simulator. For both announced and unannounced meals, the controller achieves comparable glucose regulation performance in terms of mean glucose (134.9 mg/dL vs. 135.4 mg/dL, p < 0.001; 149.7 mg/dL vs. 151.7 mg/dL, p < 0.001, respectively) and percentage time in [70, 180] mg/dL (93.8% vs. 92.4%, p < 0.001; 76.0% vs. 72.4%, p < 0.001, respectively) without increasing the risk of hypoglycemia. The results indicate the feasibility of achieving comparable glucose regulation performance through a non-optimization control law for AP systems.