Control of Wearable Artificial Kidney

In chronic renal failure, the patient's health is supported by renal replacement therapy, traditionally hemodialysis, carried out in a hospital setting. This approach limits the patient, requiring being at the hemodialysis apparatus for 4 hours 3–4 times a week, which reduces the quality of life. In addition, the cost of an artificial blood purification procedure is high and often unavailable to uninsured patients. To solve these problems, over the past 20 years, several research teams around the world have been developing prototypes of portable equipment for extrarenal blood purification (wearable artificial kidney), which will allow the dialysis procedure to be performed on an outpatient basis, improve the effectiveness of therapy and increase patients' quality of life. When developing such equipment, an important component is a detailed study of the control system, which includes subsystems for low-level control of the hardware, protection from emergency situations, a decision support system for the attending physician, etc. This article describes the general principles used in the development of the Renart-PD wearable artificial kidney apparatus and its control system.