Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient Control of Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is one of the major concerns in current medical studies. Traditional clinical practice involves non-autonomous manual injection of insulin in the blood, while current research in the field of autonomous regulation of blood glucose concentration mostly focuses on model-based control techniques. This paper introduces a novel Reinforcement Learning-based controller for autonomous glycemic regulation in the treatment of type 1 diabetes, building on the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm. The proposed control method is validated through in-vitro simulations on the Bergman glucoregulatory model, proving that it successfully preserves healthy values of blood glucose concentration, while overcoming both standard clinical practice and classical model-based control techniques in terms of both control effort and computational efficiency for real-time applications.