Managing Diabetes through Artificial Pancreas Devices

Managing diabetes through artificial pancreas
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In their paper titled The Artificial Pancreas: Current Status and Prospects in the Management of Diabetes, Peyser, Dassau, Breton and & Skyler (2014) discuss the advancement made in the making of artificial devices used to manage diabetes. The paper alludes to improvements in insulin pumps, insulin, and systems to monitor glucose as factors that have enabled the present environment to develop artificial pancreas devices. The most important aspects of the paper are the two approaches to closed-loop control of glucose in persons with diabetes. The unihormonal approach is based on the use of insulin to reduce blood sugar and reduces the risks of hypoglycemia by relying on sophisticated mitigation algorithms. The bihormonal approach, on the other hand, lowers blood glucose by use of insulin and raises blood glucose by use of glucagon. It also depends on sophisticated algorithms to ensure the safety of the user.
The strategy of control algorithms and supervision control for application to artificial pancreases encompasses several approaches, which include fuzzy logic, model predictive control, and proportional-integral-derivative as well as monitoring safety designs. Advancement of technology has augmented the research on the artificial pancreas. Innovation in the use of smartphone has revolutionized the research put mobile phones at the core of an artificial pancreas. Progression in technology indicates that realization of an artificial pancreas is within reach (Mohan & Unnikrishnan, 2016).
There is a great need for patients suffering from diabetes, who are hooked on insulin, to measure their blood glucose using the medical device and inject insulin or acquire insulin through pumps to prevent hyperglycemia. Lack of proper regulation that is feedback control of glucose, episodes of hypoglycemia is related to consistent use of insulin. Artificial pancreas complements the need for an updated insulin level by providing patients with real-time data on their glucose level. However, the closed loop glucose control suffers suboptimal accuracy, and reliability is still not easy to achieve.
Understanding artificial pancreas requires a particular roadmap. Kowalski (2009) proposed a research outline into an artificial pancreas which has been used as the core foundation for progress made in the realm of an artificial pancreas. The roadmap can be summarized as reduced severe hypoglycemia exposure and hypoglycemic seizures through shutting off insulin pump minimizing system, which is predictive and whose goal is to reduce average hypoglycemia exposure; overnight closed loop control; closed-loop control at full diurnal both in the presence and absence of meal announcements and complete daily closed-loop control with a bihormonal system.
Basic functionality of artificial pancreas
Self-monitoring of blood glucose had been heralded as an achievement regarding insulin treatment. Using the system, diabetic patients had the opportunity to gather real-time data regarding their blood glucose level. They had been able to respond to hyperglycemia by being able to make therapeutic decisions on time using data from blood glucose meter. However, the inve...