A mathematical model for the robust blood glucose tracking

In this paper, we study the problem of the robust blood glucose tracking. Tracking here means that the error between a state variable of a system under control and its desired time-varying reference converges to zero over time. Robustness here means that a controller designed for a system can tolerate a small variation of the system parameters. Since the parameters in the blood glucose regulation system differ in people, such a robust controller is useful in the insulin pump technology: an insulin pump equipped with such a robust controller could be used in a group of people. Thus, in our study, parameter uncertainties are introduced into a mathematical model of the blood glucose regulation system. Using an actual blood glucose level as feedback and an exogenous glucose input and a desired glucose reference as feedforward, we design a robust feedback and feedforward controller, which drives the blood glucose to track the desired time-varying glucose reference for any small uncertainties. Numerical simulations with published experimental blood glucose data are conducted to further confirm our theoretical results.