Patent ID: 6180416
Filing Date: 2001-01-30
Classification: A61B,Y10S

Abstract:
A method for continually or continuously measuring an analyte present in a biological system, said method comprising:(a) transdermally extracting the analyte from the biological system using a sampling system that is in operative contact with a skin or mucosal surface of said biological system;(b) obtaining a raw signal from the extracted analyte, wherein said raw signal is specifically related to the analyte;(c) performing a calibration step which correlates the raw signal obtained in step (b) with a measurement value indicative of the concentration of analyte present in the biological system at the time of extraction;(d) repeating steps (a)-(b) to obtain a series of measurement values at selected time intervals, wherein the sampling system is maintained in operative contact with the skin or mucosal surface of said biological system to provide for a continual or continuous analyte measurement; and(e) predicting a measurement value based on the series of measurement values using the Mixtures of Experts algorithm, where the individual experts have a linear form ##EQU18##wherein (An) is an analyte of interest, n is the number of experts, An.sub.i is the analyte predicted by Expert i; and w.sub.i is a weighting value, and the individual experts An.sub.i are further defined by the expression shown as Equation (2) ##EQU19##wherein, An.sub.i is the analyte predicted by Expert i; P.sub.j is one of m parameters, m is typically less than 100; a.sub.ij are coefficients; and z.sub.i is a constant; and further where the weighting value, w.sub.i, is defined by the formula shown as Equation (3) ##EQU20##where e refers to than exponential function and the d.sub.k (note that the d.sub.i in the numerator of Equation 3 is one of the d.sub.k) are a parameter set analogous to Equation 2 that is used to determine the weights w.sub.i, The d.sub.k are given by Equation 4 ##EQU21##where .alpha..sub.jk is a coefficient, P.sub.j is one of m parameters, and where .omega..sub.k is a constant.