Development and Implementation of an Educational Simulator: GLUCOSIM
Abstract
An educational software package for simulating glucose-insulin interactions in a healthy person and a type-1 diabetes mellitus patient has been developed and successfully implemented in the Introduction to Bioengineering Course for two consecutive years at IIT. The software may serve as an educational tool in undergraduate and graduate-level bioengineering courses to help students in learning diabetes physiology. Mathematical models with varying degrees of complexity are built based on the pharmacokinetic diagrams of insulin and glucose, and integrated with a graphical user interface to provide a user-friendly environment. The interactive nature of the simulator enables students to run virtual experiments to test the effect of initial conditions on the physiological dynamics of healthy and diabetic human bodies.