PEP: Hardware Emulation Platform for Physiological Closed-Loop Control Systems

Physiological closed-loop control systems (PCLCS) provide reliable and efficient treatment in medical care, but it is crucial to ensure patient safety when examining the potential advantages. Traditional animal and clinical studies are resource-intensive and costly, making them impractical for evaluating PCLCS in every relevant clinical scenario. Therefore, computational or mathematical models have emerged as an alternative for assessing PCLCS. Hardware-in-the-loop testing platforms can provide a more efficient alternative to traditional animal and clinical studies. The platforms utilize computational or mathematical models to simulate PCLCS, providing a cost-effective and efficient approach that can minimize errors during the development process. Although various software simulation platforms can model specific physiological systems, there is a lack of hardware emulation platforms for PCLCS. In this demonstration, we present a novel physiological emulation platform (PEP) using a hardware-in-the-loop method developed to connect a computational model of the patient’s physiology to the actual PCLC device hardware, enabling real-time testing of the device while incorporating the hardware components.