Embedded Control Design for Insulin Pump

This paper presents the design of an embedded control system for insulin pump. The insulin pump is an integrated component in any closed loop insulin delivery system for type I diabetes. The pump consists of three main components: micro-needles, insulin reservoir (syringe), and piezoelectric (PZT) linear servo motor. The actuated syringe has an injection back pressure that resists the linear motion of the driving PZT motor. This back pressure acts as a disturbance and leads to inaccurate position and consequently an imprecise insulin dosage. Therefore, a highly precise positioning control on the pump is required to control the insulin dosage and to maintain the blood glucose level in its safe range. The proposed controller is designed using fuzzy logic as a nonlinear controller to compensate any non-modeled nonlinearities in the system. The embedded controller for the PZT motor can be implemented using FPGA or microcontroller chip. This controller acts as a slave and responds to its master controller which controls the complete closed loop insulin delivery system.