Smart autonomous multi modal sensors for vital signs monitoring
Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) remain the leading cause of mortality and a major cause of morbidity in Europe. Every year there are more than 6 million new cases of CVD in the EU and more than 11 million in Europe as a whole. With almost 49 million people living with the disease in the EU, the cost to the EU economies is €210 billion a year. There is a growing demand for a reliable cardiac monitoring system to catch the intermittent abnormalities and detect critical cardiac behaviours which, in extreme cases, can lead to sudden death. The objective of the Smart Autonomous Multi Modal Sensors for Vital Signs Monitoring (SmartVista) project is to develop and demonstrate a next generation, cost-effective, smart multimodal sensing platform to reduce incidences of sudden death caused by CVD. The key innovation in SmartVista is to integrate 1D/2D nanomaterials based sensors to monitor the heart, thermoelectric energy harvesters to extract energy from the body to power the system and printable battery systems to store this energy. Together these will result in a self-powered device that will autonomously monitor the electrocardiograph, respiratory flow, oxygen flow and temperature of the patient. This information will then be transmitted wirelessly for online health processing. This real-time self-powered monitoring of a patient’s health in this manner is not currently available so the technology that will be developed in SmartVista will position us at the forefront of digital health and wearable biosensor technology for wireless monitoring in hospitals and of remote patients, both of which are necessary in this era of an aging population. The SmartVista platform enables wireless, real-time, continuous patient monitoring and delivers a seamless feed of patient data and will contribute to the EU vision of an Internet of Things for healthcare.