Individualized empirical models of carbohydrate and insulin effects on T1DM blood glucose dynamics

One of the main limiting factors in improving glucose control for T1DM subjects is the lack of a precise description of meal and insulin intake effects on blood glucose. Knowing magnitude and duration of such effects would be useful not only for patients and physicians but also for the development of a controller targeting glycemia regulation. Therefore, in this paper we focus on estimating low-complexity yet physiologically sound and individualized MISO models of the glucose metabolism in T1DM able to reflect the basic dynamical features of the glucose-insulin metabolic system in response to a meal intake or an insulin injection. The models are continuous-time second-order transfer functions relating the amount of carbohydrate of a meal and the insulin units of the accordingly administered dose (inputs) to plasma glucose evolution (output) and consist of few parameters clinically relevant to be identified. The estimation strategy is data-driven and exploits a database in which meals and insulin boluses are separated in time, allowing the unique identification of the model parameters.