Beyond Glucose-Only Assessment: Advancing Nocturnal Hypoglycemia Prediction in Children with Type 1 Diabetes

Marco Voegeli, Sonia Laguna, Heike Leutheuser, Marie-Anne Burckhardt, Julia E Vogt

Track: Full paper

Keywords: Children Nocturnal Hypoglycemia, Type 1 Diabetes, Wearable Health Monitoring, Transfer Learning, Feature Engineering

TL;DR: This study uses machine learning and wearable data to predict nocturnal hypoglycemia in children with Type 1 Diabetes, achieving high performing transfer models despite data challenges, and aims to improve diabetes management.

Abstract: The *dead-in-bed* syndrome describes the sudden and unexplained death of young individuals with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) without prior long-term complications. One leading hypothesis attributes this phenomenon to nocturnal hypoglycemia (NH), a dangerous drop in blood glucose during sleep. This study aims to improve NH prediction in children with T1D by leveraging physiological data and machine learning (ML) techniques. We analyze an in-house dataset collected from 16 children with T1D, integrating physiological metrics from wearable sensors. We explore predictive performance through feature engineering, model selection, architectures, and oversampling. To address data limitations, we apply transfer learning from a publicly available adult dataset. Our results achieve an AUROC of 0.75 $\pm$ 0.21 on the in-house dataset, further improving to 0.78 $\pm$ 0.05 with transfer learning. This research moves beyond glucose-only predictions by incorporating physiological parameters, showcasing the potential of ML to enhance NH detection and improve clinical decision-making for pediatric diabetes management.

Submission Number: 28