Objective
Because of a continuously growing number of cardiac patients in Europe, the only practical way to decrease the overall cardiac mortality and morbidity is to supply the citizen with a portable care device that will allow him to monitor his health status and early detect cardiac events such as ischemia and arrhythmia.
EPI-MEDICS will design a solution based on the interpretation of ECG derived cardiological syndromes and develop a friendly and easy-to-use, cost-effective and intelligent personal device that may be used anywhere, anytime. The device will be able to record and store ECG signals with a professional quality level, incorporate intelligent self-adaptive data processing and decision-making techniques, generate different levels of alarms, and forward the alarm messages with the recorded signals to the relevant health care providers by means of new generation wireless communication devices.
Objectives:
Heart disease is the main cause of early disability and premature death in western countries. Moreover, because of the ageing of the population, the number of cardiac deaths is steadily increasing. However, the only available diagnosis tool useful for assessing the probability of cardiac events is the electrocardiogram (ECG). But, most of the cardiac deaths occur outside of the hospital. So, new strategies are required to reduce the time before treatment. The challenge is two fold: detect as early as possible the onset of arrhythmias and schema events by monitoring the changes of the ECG of the citizen at risk, and then involve without delay, but only if necessary, the health care structures. The aim of the epi-medics project is to develop and experiment a novel "intelligent" Personal ECG Monitor (PEM) for the early detection and management of cardiac events. The objective is to design a very affordable, easy-to-use but powerful, embedded device that shall be able to record, store and synthesize standard 12-lead ECGs, incorporate intelligent self-adaptive data processing and decision-making techniques, generate different levels of alarms, and forward the alarm messages with the recorded signals to the relevant health care providers by means of new generation wireless communication techniques.
Work description:
The project will be steered by very experienced partners with an established track record of scientific knowledge, European collaboration and industrial successes in the fields of Cardiology, Quantitative Electrocardiology, serial ECG analysis, Soft Computing, Medical Informatics, Telemedicine, Medical Instrumentation and microchips development. The user requirements will be identified by proposing preliminary specifications of the device and typical scenarios of use, and by collecting the user requirements in a database that can be dynamically updated and revised during the whole running of the project by means of Web based technologies. Different categories of users are concerned: cardiologists, GPs, paramedics, the patients. The next step is to determine an easy to use, pseudo-orthogonal subset of ECG electrode positions that is adequate for home care or ambulatory use, capable of synthesising standard 12-lead ECGs for integration in the electronic patient record and for control by the cardiologist, develop computerised serial ECG analysis methods that are compliant with the clinical scenarios, and determine the most relevant ECG measurements for the detection of ischemic events and arrhythmia's, elaborate robust integrated decision-making methods having auto-learning and auto-adaptive capabilities for the generation of alarms. Another work item is to develop means and tools for wireless data communication between the PEM devices and the health professional systems and infrastructures, from anywhere, at anytime, allowing a seamless integration of personal health data and the patients ECG signals in the patients' health record for the enhancement of the continuity and of the quality of care. The last step will be the evaluation of a series of around 200 prototypes that will be distributed to different categories of patients and assessed by a network of cardiologists and GPs interconnected by Internet.
Milestones:
The main expected result will be the design of an enhanced, intelligent and portable PEM prototype that will be able to detect cardiac arrhythmias and ischemias, generate different levels of alarms, and forward them to the relevant health care providers. The prototypes will be assessed on a series of ambulatory normal and cardiac patients from almost three countries. The PEMs will also contribute to build up the electronic patients records by providing additional, useful and reusable ECG information for the remote assessment of the citizens' cardiac status and their pre-hospitalisation triage.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinecardiologycardiovascular diseasescardiac arrhythmia
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternet
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdata sciencedata processing
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
75654 PARIS CEDEX 13
France