For patient comfort and compliance, a long-term ECG recording system technique for a body surface location which is remote from the heart (eg. a wearable band on the wrist or positioned on the upper arm), it has been investigated that it is best to use dry electrodes, as in practice patients will either lose the gel or the gel-electrode interface impedance degrades. More importantly, is to avoid the use of skin adhesives for attachment onto the body; therefore, a wearable band on the wrist or upper arm, is a feasible and practical solution.
The project has addressed the related technological challenges through a multidisciplinary, multi-sectoral and international Consortium joint effort. Through the 3 years of project research and innovation actions, it has achieved the indicated 6 General Objectives presented in the Grant Agreement (GA). In Period 1 (2-year) 65% of the Project’s tasks in 13 deliverable were completed. Then by the end of Period 2 (only 1-year) 100% of project tasks and deliverable (total 20), through all the 59 Secondment actions, for a total of 72 person-month were completed. An important project task was the clinical study in Work Package 5. This was successfully completed and provided an evaluation of the possible integrated clinical knowledge.
The project has focused on the completion of the following specific objectives:
1) An advanced dry-electrode based arm-band monitoring system, which will enable continuous long-term, comfortable, non-invasive ECG recordings of cardiac patients presenting sporadic abnormalities of heart rate or rhythm, or for preventive long-term ECG screening schemes of healthy subjects, with cardiac related risks, for early detection and diagnosis of heart disease.
2) An advanced real-time signal processing technique for effective ECG denoising. Through various secondment activities in the project, an integrated technological solution in a system prototype, has enabled the clinical assessment of the combined performance of the ECG denoising technique applied to the far-field ECG signal with an adjacent pair of dry-electrode wearable system device.
The main impact observations in the Final Period are the following ones:
• An International Conference opening Keynote Speaker (invited) presentation (60 minutes) about the WASTCArD Project was presented to a large audience at the IEEE- ETCM in Ecuador, on 18/Oct.
• The WASTCArD Google website of the Project has been updated and is still live on the Internet ( https://sites.google.com/site/wastcardproject/ ).
• There were some complicated administrative procedures for some Third Country(TC) partners, eg., Venezuela, but which were successfully managed by the host organisations.
In this Period 2, INSA-Lyon managed these challenges with their hosting of one Fellow from Venezuela; nevertheless, all the administrative obstacles were managed. UniZg-FER and Ulster managed this issue well, as before in the Period before.
