Improved blood glucose control for critically ill subjects

For patients in intensive care units (ICUs), control of blood glucose level is an important factor in reducing serious complications and mortality. Standard protocols for glucose control in ICUs have been based on infrequent glucose measurements, look-up tables to determine the appropriate insulin infusion rates, and bedside administration of the insulin infusion by ICU staff. In this paper a new automatic control strategy is proposed based on frequent glucose measurements and a self-tuning control technique. During a short initial time period when manual glucose control is performed using a standard protocol, a simple dynamic model of the glucose–insulin system is identified in real time using recursive least squares. Then an adaptive PID controller is tuned, based on the model parameters, and the controller is turned on. A simulation study based on detailed physiological models of the glucose–insulin dynamics demonstrates that the proposed control strategy performs better than standard protocols for insulin infusion.