Blood Glucose Level Prediction Using Physiological Models and Support Vector Regression

Patients with diabetes must continually monitor their blood glucose levels and adjust insulin doses, striving to keep blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible. Blood glucose levels that deviate from the normal range can lead to serious short-term and long-term complications. An automatic prediction model that warned people of imminent changes in their blood glucose levels would enable them to take preventive action. Modeling inter-patient differences and the combined effects of insulin and life events on blood glucose have been particularly challenging in the design of accurate blood glucose forecasting systems. In this paper, we describe a solution that uses a generic physiological model of blood glucose dynamics to generate informative features for a Support Vector Regression model that is trained on patient specific data. Experimental results show that the new prediction model outperforms all three diabetes experts involved in the study, thus demonstrating the utility of using the generic physiological features in machine learning models that are individually trained for every patient.