Towards an educational diabetes model

We are developing a mathematical model to serve as the heart of an educational diabetes simulator. The model is based on physiological principles and consists of three compartments: the gut, the plasma and the interstitial fluid. Glucose and insulin in- and outflow is described for all three compartments using integral/differential equations. The model can be adjusted to predict glucose and insulin concentrations for healthy persons, patients with diabetes type 1 or patients with diabetes type 2. The differences are accomplished by using different values for the parameters of the model. We have performed parameter estimation on data of healthy persons and on data of patients with diabetes type 1. This gives us the values for the parameters for these two groups. The results are promising: for healthy people the data is almost perfectly fitted by our model and for patients with diabetes type 1 the trends of the data are predicted adequately. Unfortunately there was no data available to perform parameter estimation for patients with diabetes type 2. The next steps will now be to obtain more data for patients with diabetes type 1 or 2. This will help us further improve the model, in particular the part that describes food uptake, and to incorporate exercise and emotions into the model. It will also enable us to determine the parameter values for the diabetes type 2 model, thus providing us with the last information needed to develop the educational diabetes simulator