With funding support from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) has awarded a new grant totaling $500,000 over two years to Illinois Institute of Technology for the project, “Additional Signals for Detection of Exercise, Stress and Sleep Effects and Prediction of Glucose Levels for Next Generation AP Systems.” The team will work to develop the systems and algorithms needed to collect and interpret data about stress and exercise to be extracted by machine learning and artificial intelligence for use by their multivariable artificial pancreas system.

Professor of Chemical Engineering and Director of the Engineering Center for Diabetes Research and Education Ali Cinar serves as the principal investigator on the grant. The new funding stems from an initiative that developed based on his research over the last seven years into multivariable artificial pancreas (AP) systems. Through simulations and clinical experiments the team hopes to underline benefits of using additional information from wearable sensors in AP systems.

Illinois Tech will collaborate with the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago who received subcontracts for clinical experiments.

Funding for this grant is made possible by collaborative support from the JDRF and the Helmsley Charitable Trust.