Monitoring Artificial Pancreas Trials Through Agent-based Technologies: A Case Report

The increase in the availability and reliability of network connections lets envision systems supporting a continuous remote monitoring of clinical parameters useful either for overseeing chronic diseases or for following clinical trials involving outpatients. We report here the results achieved by a telemedicine infrastructure that has been linked to an artificial pancreas platform and used during a trial of the AP@home project, funded by the European Union. The telemedicine infrastructure is based on a multiagent paradigm and is able to deliver to the clinic any information concerning the patient status and the operation of the artificial pancreas. A web application has also been developed, so that the clinic staff and the researchers involved in the design of the blood glucose control algorithms are able to follow the ongoing experiments. Albeit the duration of the experiments in the trial discussed in the article was limited to only 2 days, the system proved to be successful for monitoring patients, in particular overnight when the patients are sleeping. Based on that outcome we can conclude that the infrastructure is suitable for the purpose of accomplishing an intelligent monitoring of an artificial pancreas either during longer trials or whenever that system will be used as a routine treatment.