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LifeCall Wearable EKG Heart Health Monitoring, Analysing and Warning System

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Innovative system to tackle cardiovascular disease head on

Cardiovascular disease is the cause of approximately 3.9 million deaths every year in Europe. The EU-funded project LifeCall has been working to change this with their electrocardiogram (ECG) heart health monitoring, analysis and warning device.

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An ECG (or EKG) is a critical element of heart health. By tracking it over a continuous period, a deeper diagnosis of cardiac problems and diseases can be achieved. Currently though, certain vital information is not being recorded, such as the changes that can be observed through an ECG before a heart attack occurs. Individuals and institutions are also not following vital biometric data and healthcare providers, including cardiology hospitals, have no personalised history-oriented data on diagnosis of cardiovascular disease in the long run. On top of these, those who are required to have a regular ECG do not go to check-ups. Fighting cardiovascular disease To address the information gap, the LifeCall project, coordinated by Turkish company Sensencall, developed a mobile non-invasive, nanotextile-based medical data-producing tool. Project coordinator Dr Emre Ozdogan highlights: “LifeCall is an innovative system that aims to create an affordable, reliable, comfortable, electrodeless, wearable ECG device.” It consists of a simple wearable shirt and strap with newly developed innovative conductive textile electrodes. “It captures real-time ECG data that is passed to a mobile phone for recording. This is then later sent to a centralised server in a secure and private way. The data is stored remotely to share with related parties,” outlines Dr Ozdogan. Invaluable benefits Using a basic shirt and its supporting system, critical life-threatening heart events can be captured before actual damage occurs. This is something that is not possible with a conventional hospital Holter EKG. In fact, “this approach can easily replace the current uncomfortable and not easily affordable event monitoring and Holter EKG devices,” Dr Ozdogan explains. An additional benefit of the device is that it can be used daily, over a long period of time, and without negatively affecting a user’s day-to-day life. Furthermore, it records ECG data for about 3 weeks without interruption and provides a pattern to healthcare providers to understand individuals’ long-term ECG data correlation. Dr Ozdogan adds: “It will save many lives by analysing and gathering data for long-term heart monitoring and many other biosignals.” Into the future LifeCall’s feasibility study provided the opportunity to explore the functional expectations of customers, market requirements, size, marketing price, distribution channels and network, financial projections and competitor’s analysis in detail. This helped to understand LifeCall’s potential, benefits, and current and future challenges. From this study, the project team is now working on implementing the designated new features and development studies in parallel to establishing partnerships. LifeCall will be commercialised in the near future with the aim of using fully integrated conductive textile and beacon/Bluetooth technologies where battery life may last more than 2 years. Dr Ozdogan adds: “Since we are ambitious enough to launch a product that is disruptive, we will first excel in our disruptive areas such as 2-year battery life and fully washable electrodeless ECG shirt including electronic components.”

Keywords

LifeCall, ECG, cardiovascular disease, wearable, EKG, heart health, conductive textile, biometric data, heart monitoring

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