The projects seek to develop and evaluate new healthcare monitoring technology for heart rhythm and psychiatric and neurological diseases. The goals are to enable early detection of stroke and to support continuous and ‘in-the-wild’ monitoring. The Innovation Fund has awarded 27 million for these projects.
The two projects are:
- REAFEL – Reaching the Frail Elderly
- BHRP – Biometric Healthcare Research Platform for research in psychiatric and neurological diseases using sensor technologies
REAFEL – Reaching the Frail Elderly
Chronic heart related diseases are a major public health issue (prevalence 2% and 8% for >65 yrs) and is the leading cause of hospitalization for people >65 yrs. Compared to hospital-based management of patients, home monitoring embraces a patient-centric self-management alternative system. Early detection of cardiac rhythm disorders allows for timely intervention and prevention of serious conditions such as stroke and repeated falls.
The REAFEL project has two aims.
- To research, design, and implement a telemedicine sensor platform that enables for remote monitoring of patients, providing automated alerts and reminders to the patient and clinicians. The goal is to provide a home monitoring solution that is applicable for any general practitioner (GP) and Cardiology department for remote live monitoring and review of health data for optimizing the diagnosing and treatment of a potential critical heart rhythm disorders.
- To reorganize and improve the diagnostic process of heart rhythm disorders in frail elderly patients by using this telemedicine setup. Timely diagnosis may prevent repeated falls with adequate pacemaker treatment and medical adjustments. Likewise, strokes related to atrial fibrillation can be prevented with adequate anticoagulation, where the latter amount to 81 m DKK in the Capital Region of Denmark alone.
"In 2015 approximately 600 patients in the Capital Region of Denmark suffered strokes which could have been prevented, if doctors had been able to diagnose their heart rhythm problems and provide proper treatment in time."
Helena Domínguez, Chief Physician at Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital
In order to accomplish its goals, this project will make use of a new heart rhythm monitor, the C3, developed by the Danish company Cortrium Aps. The C3 will also cardiologists at Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital to monitor patients’ heart rhythm online, as opposed to the in-hospital procedures used today. This will allow cardiologists to effectively cooperate with general practitioners to quickly start treatments tailored to the individual patient.
This project will also help improve how the C3 handles diagnostic data and further develop the data-sharing platforms needed for the C3 to be used in general clinical settings outside this project. This development will be overseen by CACHET, involving researchers from the Technical University of Denmark. Research will focus on developing advanced algorithms able to automatically detect heart rhythm disturbances using C3 data, and on developing a system for quickly notifying patients and physicians of early signs of heart rhythm disturbances. This development will allow better organization and communication between heart physicians, general practitioners and patients, leading to earlier diagnoses and more efficient treatment.
BHRP – Biometric Healthcare Research Platform for research in psychiatric and neurological diseases using sensor technologies
The rapidly increasing interest within research to monitor and diagnose psychiatric and neurological diseases more efficiently in people’s daily lives (in-the-wild) and in the laboratory (in-the-lab) requires new IT infrastructure effectively combining various types of sensors. The yearly cost of these diseases in Europe alone is estimated at Euro 800 billion of which Euro 500 billion is related to psychiatric diseases.
Today no integrated in-the-wild and in-the-lab platform exist that empowers researchers to conduct biometric healthcare research in an efficient way. Hence, the IT task in itself is massive and in many cases become prohibitive for research being conducted with the loss of innovation and efficiency gains as a consequence.
The aim of this project is to develop the first integrated in-the-wild and in-the-lab biometric healthcare research platform designed specifically to the needs of the researchers. The platform will extend iMotions' world-leading general-purpose in- the-lab platform, which has gained significant traction both within behavioral research and in healthcare research despite not currently optimized for this purpose. In this project, iMotions is teaming up with researcher in CACHET involving both IT researchers and physicians to build and test this new platform. DTU will design the software architecture for in-the-wild data sampling and do advanced data analysis. Two clinical studies will be done at Zealand University Hospital (Epilepsy) and the Gillberg Neuropsychiatry Centre (Autism).