Abstract for: Dynamics of Glucose-Insulin Regulation: Insulin Injection Regime for Patients with Diabetes Type I

A healthy human body regulates blood glucose concentration via regulating the insulin concentration. Diabetes type 1 patients’ bodies cannot produce insulin. Therefore, blood glucose needs to be regulated by insulin injections. This is not an easy task because there are dynamic complexities such as accumulation processes, delays, nonlinearities, and feedback loops in the system. Moreover, the task is a critical one because both low and high levels of glucose are harmful for the body. In this work, we first developed and calibrated a system dynamics model for “the two time delay model” as described by Li et al., 2006. Later, we introduced a penalty formulation to be able to evaluate different cases. We also deleted the insulin production flow and added insulin injections to the base model in order to obtain the model for a diabetes type 1 patient. According to the initial results of the study, the suggested decision making heuristic would yield satisfactory results. However, further tests under different glucose infusion rate patterns and improvement to the heuristic are necessary.