Closed-loop control in clinical pharmacology paradigms, benefits, and challenges

It is clear that closed-loop control for clinical pharmacology would significantly advance our understanding of the wide effects of pharmacological agents and anesthetics, as well as advance the state-of-the-art in drug delivery systems. While our focus in this paper has been to survey the developments of active control methods to deliver sedation to critically ill patients in an acute care environment and outline some of the future challenges of active sedation control, these control methods will have implications for other uses of closed-loop control of drug delivery. There are numerous potential applications such as control of glucose, heart rate, blood pressure, etc., that may be improved as a result of active drug dosing control. Payoffs would arise from improvements in medical care, health care, reliability of drug dosing equipment, as well as reduced cost for health care.