Cardiovascular diseases are one of the leading causes of death worldwide. One of the indicators and risk factors for the development of cardiovascular diseases is (high) blood pressure. In cardiovascular care, the blood pressure of patients is therefore measured frequently and often over a longer period of time.
Within the MIT-ZUID grant project Cardiac-AI project, FreeSense Solutions and Medace want to develop a prototype of a non-invasive, continuous and comfortable blood pressure measurement based on PhotoPlethysmoGraphy (PPG), for perioperative (home) patients. These are mainly patients recovering from – or awaiting – cardiovascular surgery. Rendering of prototype shown on the right.
Through this new non-invasive blood pressure monitoring, cardiovascular costs could be drastically reduced since:
- Accurate post-operative monitoring can advance calculated hospital discharge up to 2 days earlier than nominal
- The home monitoring can establish early diagnosis of abnormalities and separate post-operative stress from medical complications. This can prevent unnecessary, expensive, first aid visits.
Since it involves continuous blood pressure monitoring, the solution must be much more comfortable (and subconsciously) than the usual cuff measurement. This project combines PPG measurement via a small ear sensor and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to continuously reconstruct blood pressure. At the same time, it is investigated how to design the quality system of a device which includes AI under the new European Medical Device Regulation (MDR).
