Joerg Habetha

The myheart project - fighting cardiovascular diseases by prevention and early diagnosis

MyHeart is a so-called Integrated Project of the European Union aiming to develop intelligent systems for the prevention and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. The project develops smart electronic and textile systems and appropriate services that empower the users to take control of their own health status.

Early Indication of Decompensated Heart Failure in Patients on Home-Telemonitoring: A Comparison of Prediction Algorithms Based on Daily Weight and Noninvasive Transthoracic Bio-impedance

Background Heart Failure (HF) is a common reason for hospitalization. Admissions might be prevented by early detection of and intervention for decompensation. Conventionally, changes in weight, a possible measure of fluid accumulation, have been used to detect deterioration. Transthoracic impedance may be a more sensitive and accurate measure of fluid accumulation. Objective In this study, we review previously proposed predictive algorithms using body weight and noninvasive transthoracic bio-impedance (NITTI) to predict HF decompensations. Methods We monitored 91 patients with chronic HF for an average of 10 months using a weight scale and a wearable bio-impedance vest. Three algorithms were tested using either simple rule-of-thumb differences (RoT), moving averages (MACD), or cumulative sums (CUSUM). Results Algorithms using NITTI in the 2 weeks preceding decompensation predicted events (P<.001); however, using weight alone did not. Cross-validation showed that NITTI improved sensitivity of all algorithms tested and that trend algorithms provided the best performance for either measurement (Weight-MACD: 33%, NITTI-CUSUM: 60%) in contrast to the simpler rules-of-thumb (Weight-RoT: 20%, NITTI-RoT: 33%) as proposed in HF guidelines. Conclusions NITTI measurements decrease before decompensations, and combined with trend algorithms, improve the detection of HF decompensation over current guideline rules; however, many alerts are not associated with clinically overt decompensation.

Error probabilities for radio transmissions of MC-CDMA based W-LANs

IEEE 802.11a/e has become a worldwide wireless local area network (W-LAN) standard, with a rapid development. Many proposals have been made for its further expansion, and some of them focus on multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA), a novel, high capacity, multicarrier modulation scheme. In this paper we present an analysis of the error models for radio transmissions in such systems. An accurate model of the channel is necessary for the performance evaluation of the protocol by means of computer simulations. Focusing on the estimation of the signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) at the detector and on the calculation of a packet error ratio (PER), in this contribution we discuss a modeling approach which allows an efficient calculation of frame transmissions over a MC-CDMA shared radio channel.

Model-Based Atrial Fibrillation Detection

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, leading to several patient risks. This kind of arrhythmia affects mostly elderly people, in particular those who suffer from heart failure disease, one of the main causes of hospitalization. Thus, detection of AF becomes decisive in the diagnosis and prevention of cardiac threats, with particular interest in the context of pHealth solutions.This chapter presents a real-time AF detection scheme, developed within the MyHeart project, a pHealth project financed by the European Commission. The proposed strategy is based on a computational intelligence approach, combining expert knowledge and neural networks. In particular, it makes use of the three principal physiological characteristics of AF, applied by cardiologists in their daily reasoning: P wave absence/presence, heart rate irregularity, and atrial activity analysis. This knowledge-based approach has the advantage of increasing interpretability of the results to the medical community, while improving detection robustness.The clinical validation of the strategy is performed using public databases (MIT-BIH Arrhythmia and QT databases from Physionet) as well as the ECG data acquired with the MyHeart vest during the MyHeart trial.

Personal Healthcare - the future of chronic disease management

ldquoPersonal Healthcarerdquo refers to the prevention and management of diseases outside the institutional points of care. The paradigm shift is to apply healthcare whereever a person may be, at his home or on the move. This new paradigm will allow a much more frequent interaction of a professional or the patient himself with his health status. Even for ill people the typical frequency of doctor visits is several months, whereas with a personalized system care can be applied on a daily or even continuous basis. Such an approach is not only suited for remotely managing chronically ill patients but also for the very personalized prevention of such diseases. The current demographic development will accelerate the paradigm shift towards personal healthcare, because the growth of the percentage of elderly people among the population will lead to an increased prevalence of chronic diseases, which could not be handled with the traditional health system (in terms of personnel but also cost). The talk will give an overview of the current Philips activities in the field of personal healthcare and current research activities like the MyHeart and HeartCycle projects. MyHeart is the largest project of the European Union in the field of personal healthcare aiming to develop intelligent systems for the prevention and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. The project develops smart electronic and textile systems and appropriate services that empower the users to take control of their own health status. HeartCycle is a recently started European research project in the 7th framework of the European Commission and focused on closing the loop from remote monitoring to treatment.

Innovative Concepts for Prevention and Disease Management of Cardiovascular Diseases

Innovative concepts for prevention and disease management of cardio-vascular disease are being developed in the framework of MyHeart project. After a successful first phase where 16 different concepts were tested, four of them where selected on the basis of user acceptance, technical feasibility and foreseen impact. The present paper gives an overview of such product-concepts that are being implemented and will be extensively tested in the next phase of the project

Personal healthcare illustrated - The example of the myheart project

ldquoPersonal Healthcarerdquo often referred to as ldquoTelehealthrdquo is the prevention and management of diseases outside the institutional points of care. The paradigm shift is to apply healthcare whereever a person may be, at his home or on the move. This new paradigm will allow a much more frequent interaction of a professional or the patient himself with his health status. Even for ill people the typical frequency of doctor visits is several months, whereas with a personalized system care can be applied on a daily or even continuous basis. Such an approach is not only suited for remotely managing chronically ill patients but also for the very personalized prevention of such diseases. The current demographic development will accelerate the paradigm shift towards personal healthcare, because the growth of the percentage of elderly people among the population will lead to an increased prevalence of chronic diseases, which could not be handled with the traditional health system (in terms of personnel but also cost). The talk will illustrate this new paradigm using the example of the MyHeart project. MyHeart is the largest project of the European Union in the field of personal healthcare aiming to develop intelligent systems for the prevention and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases. The project develops smart electronic and textile systems and appropriate services that empower the users to take control of their own health status. The talk gives an overview of the project and focuses on the four health-related applications that the project is addressing: activity coaching, healthy and preventative living, neurological rehabilitation and heart failure management. The concepts address range from preventative care, which is widely believed to be the solution for the problem of the rise of chronic diseases, to the management of a chronic disease such as heart failure.