• 
• 

Published on March 14, 2008

Following the MyHeart project, the HeartCycle project was started in early March and is one of the largest biomedical and healthcare research projects within the EU.

The HeartCycle consortium is working to improve the quality of care for coronary heart disease and heart failure patients by developing systems which monitor their condition at home and involve them in the daily management of their condition.

These systems will comprise unobtrusive sensors built into the patient's clothing or bed sheets, and home appliances such as weighing scales and blood pressure monitors.

The consortium aims to develop dedicated software which analyses the acquired data and can be programmed to provide feedback on the patient's health, adherence to prescribed therapies and progress towards achieving health status milestones.

It also aims to develop mechanisms to report relevant data back to clinicians automatically so that they can prescribe personalised therapies and lifestyle recommendations.

Eighteen government and private organisations from the fields of research, academia, industry and medical science from nine different European countries and China are coming together for the project. HeartCycle has a project duration of four years and a budget allocation of approximately ¤21 million (Bt1 billion), of which approximately ¤14 million will be funded by the European Union as part of the EU's 7th Framework Programme.

Henk van Houten, senior vice president of Philips Research and head of the healthcare research programme, said that by developing systems that remotely monitor heart patients and motivate them to adhere to treatment regimes and adopt beneficial lifestyles, the company hoped to improve the survival of people with heart disease as well as to control the overall cost of care.

The HeartCycle project aims to extend the care management concept for specific patient groups with a focus on improving patient compliance to medication and lifestyle therapies.

Philips Research joined in the MyHeart project earlier to develop advanced telemonitoring technologies and service concepts which enable people to play an active role in maintaining their health. In the course of the project, home-based disease management was identified as a potential opportunity for improving medical standards of care.

The company's main involvement in MyHeart project so far has been the development of wearable electronics and body sensors that can unobtrusively detect and measure vital body signs such as heart rate and breathing rate, communicate and analyse the acquired data and provide feedback to users or health providers.

The prototype systems that it has developed for use in user/clinical evaluations comprise a disease management system for heart failure patients and a sleep monitoring system that can be used by patients suffering from sleep disorders or anyone who wishes to improve the quality of their sleep.

The Nation