A new virtual environment for testing and hardware implementation of closed-loop control algorithms in the artificial pancreas

This article presents a new simulation tool for designing and testing blood glucose control algorithms in patients with type 1 diabetes. The control algorithms can be designed and implemented either with textual or graphical programming languages or by importing them from several frameworks. Realistic scenarios and protocols can be customized and built through graphical user interfaces, where several outcomes are available to evaluate control performance. Sophisticated models of the glucose-insulin system, as well as representative models of the instrumentation, have been included. Unlike existing systems, this simulation tool allows integrating the control algorithms into an electronic control unit, thus reusing the entire code in a straightforward way.