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Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- Royal Philips Electronics today announced that it
will lead a new European Union (EU) funded research
project aimed at improving care of heart patients
through the development of innovative telemonitoring
solutions. Following the highly successful MyHeart
project, the HeartCycle project will start on March
1, 2008, and will be one of the largest biomedical
and healthcare research projects within the EU.
The HeartCycle consortium will work to improve the
quality of care for coronary heart disease and heart
failure patients by developing systems for
monitoring their condition at home and involving
them in the daily management of their disease. These
systems will comprise unobtrusive sensors built into
the patient’s clothing or bed sheets and home
appliances such as weight scales and blood pressure
monitors. The consortium aims to develop dedicated
software that analyzes the acquired data, and that
can be programmed to provide feedback on the
patient’s health status, plus his or her 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
personalized therapies and lifestyle
recommendations.
Public and private partners from 18 research,
academic, industrial and medical organizations from
nine different European countries and China will
team up in the project. HeartCycle will run for four
years and has a budget of approximately EUR 21
million, of which approximately EUR 14 million will
be funded by the European Union as part of the EU
7th Framework Program.
Cardiovascular disease kills around 1.9 million
people every year in the EU, with the associated
annual health costs estimated at EUR 105 billion.
Around half of these deaths occur in people who have
previously had a heart attack, most of whom will
develop heart failure before they die. There are
currently around 10 million heart failure patients
in the EU and it is one of the commonest medical
reasons for hospitalization in adults. Finding
better ways to manage and treat coronary heart
disease and chronic heart failure is therefore seen
as one of the most effective ways of reducing the
human cost and financial burden of these
debilitating conditions.
“The greatest challenge and opportunity for the
management of long-term medical conditions is to
help patients to help themselves,” says Professor
John Cleland MD, Head of the Department of
Cardiology at the University of Hull (UK), past
chairman of both the Working Group on Heart Failure
of the European Society of Cardiology and of the
British Society for Heart Failure and Chief Medical
Officer of the HeartCycle project. “Investing
directly in people who need help, and not just in
services that do things to or for them, makes sense
in terms of improved care, greater affordability and
the effective deployment of scarce nursing and
medical resources.”
“By developing systems that remotely monitor heart
patients and motivate them to adhere to treatment
regimes and adopt beneficial lifestyles, we hope to
improve the survival of people with heart disease as
well as to contain the overall cost of care,” says
Henk van Houten, senior vice president of Philips
Research and head of the Healthcare Research
program. “The development of such systems can only
be achieved efficiently via multi-disciplinary
partnerships between hardware engineers, software
engineers, textile manufacturers, industrial
designers, clinical experts and healthcare
providers, as is the case in the HeartCycle
project.”
HeartCycle Consortium membership (in
alphabetical order)
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
Clothing Plus Oy (Finland)
CSEM Centre Suisse D'electronique Et De
Microtechnique Sa (Switzerland)
Empirica Gesellschaft für Kommunikations und
Technologieforschung mbH (Germany)
Faculdade Ciencias e Tecnologia da Universidade de
Coimbra (Portugal)
Fundación Vodafone España (Spain)
Hospital Universitario Clínico San Carlos (Spain)
Instituto de Aplicaciones de las Tecnologías de la
Información y de las Comunicaciones Avanzadas
(Spain)
Medtronic Ibérica SA (Spain); Philips Electronics
Nederland B.V. (The Netherlands); Philips Research
(Germany)
Politecnico Di Milano - Dipartimento di
Bioingegneria (Italy)
Rheinisch Westfälische Technische Hochschule
(Germany)
T-Systems ITC Iberia SA (Spain); Universidad
Politécnica de Madrid (Spain)
Chinese University of Hong Kong (China)
University of Hull (United Kingdom)
Valtion Teknillinen Tutkimuskeskus (Finland)
The earlier MyHeart project developed advanced
telemonitoring technologies and service concepts to
enable people to play an active role in maintaining
their health. In the course of the MyHeart project,
home-based disease management was identified as a
potential opportunity for improving medical
standards of care. The HeartCycle project aims to
extend this disease management concept for specific
patient groups with a focus on improving patient
compliance to medication and lifestyle therapies.
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