Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the number 1 cause of death with over 17.9 million deaths worldwide and over 3.9 million in Europe every year. Population aging (more than 22% of global population is above 65 years old), stressful lifestyle, smoking, alcohol, drug abuse, food disorders and physical inactivity are the major factors responsible for development of CVDs. As a result, ~30% of the global adult population is living with some form of CVDs including coronary heart disease, heart failure, stroke and hypertension (high blood pressure (BP)).
The “Healthcare System challenge” is to find an intelligent and more effective way to enable CVDs monitoring and event prevention. In fact, specific preventive actions must be taken by healthcare systems in order to reduce such a high economic burden. Elfi-Tech addresses the challenge by guaranteeing timely and personalized treatment based on accurate and affordable, continuous, remote assessment of the patients’ cardiovascular conditions. For instance, in the case of high BP patients, this indication can be obtained only via daily measurements of the blood pressure. However, until now, physicians have only been able to accurately measure this parameter while the patient is at the hospital or at their offices, since daily home-based monitoring is often inaccurate.
The “Technological challenge” is to invent a safe method for taking accurate and continuous measurements of a set of cardiovascular parameters on a daily basis. Elfi-Tech’s concept has been to create a miniature, compact and wireless fingertip blood flow measurement device that can accurately transmit and track recorded data to an application available on PC, smartphone and tablet of both physicians and patients. Nowadays, existing solutions for CV monitoring present several drawbacks that reflect on healthcare systems and the people dealing with CVDs
