Controlling Atrial fibrillation using Cohen's model

Drug administration using infusion pumps can find application in treating patients with arrhythmias. These pumps can obviate the need to use drugs several times a day and automatically adapt the dosage to patient situation. Considering the importance of administration of right dosage, a perfect-controlled pump is needed to approach this goal. This paper focuses on controlling Atrial fibrillation (AF) arrhythmia. The abnormal heart rhythm that affects RR interval sequence and there have been some attempts to model these effects. One of these models is proposed by Cohen and colleges. Searching through the variables of this model, selecting the potential control variable (the one that its amount is affected by drugs) and finally adjusting it by designing an appropriate controller are the steps followed in this paper to pursue the idea of an automated infusion pump for controlling AF. Considering the nonlinear Cohen's model, fuzzy control is chosen as a suitable option. Controller performance has been assessed using the number of RR intervals falling into normal range. Results indicate a moderate control and not a perfect one. In our future work, we will use a more sophisticated version of Cohen's model by developing it and will increase the number of control variables to more than one; we believe all these may improve the results.