Building 324, Technical University of Denmark, DTU Compute

Millions for research into the treatment of heart patients and psychiatric and neurological diseases

Data analysis Computer calculations IT systems Software and programming Medical equipment and systems Health and diseases Mathematics

Innovation Fund Denmark has granted DKK 27 million to two major health-promoting projects carried out at the Copenhagen Center for Health Technology, CACHET,, in which DTU Compute and DTU Electrical Engineering are involved.

The RAFAEL—Reaching the Frail Elderly—project is intended to give heart patients a more flexible and less demanding course of treatment. The project will develop a flexible organization between the hospital’s cardiologists and general practitioners, so that heart arrhythmia can be diagnosed without placing unnecessary strain on the patient. In 2015, approximately 600 patients in the Capital Region of Denmark suffered a stroke which could have been avoided if the patients had received the right treatment in time.

 To make it easier to monitor the patients’ heart rhythm, the RAFAEL project will use a new sensor, C3, which has been developed by the Danish company Cortrium ApS. The sensor will measure the patients’ heart rhythm and body position. Patients can use the user-friendly sensor at home. Both the general practitioner and the cardiologists can monitor the patients’ heart rhythm online and—together with the patient—plan the treatment that best suits the patient. DTU will develop both advanced algorithms that can automatically detect atrial fibrillation using the C3 sensor, and develop a system enabling patients and doctors to identify early warning signs of atrial fibrillation.

 

Effective monitoring and diagnosis of psychiatric and neurological diseases
BHRP—Biometric Healthcare Research Platform—is the other project which has received funding from Innovation Fund Denmark to conduct research into psychiatric and neurological diseases by means of sensor technology. The purpose of the project is to develop a research platform specifically designed for researchers to counter the rapidly increasing interest among researchers to monitor and diagnose psychiatric and neurological diseases more effectively—both in the patients’ everyday lives (in-the-wild) and in the research lab (in-the-lab). In the project, researchers and doctors are teaming up with the company iMotions to build and test the new platform. DTU will design the software architecture for collecting data and will perform advanced data analysis. Two clinical tests are planned, one at Zealand University Hospital (Epilepsy) and one at Gillberg Neuropsychiatry Centre (Autism).

Read CACHET Receives Funding for two Large Projects from the Innovation Fund Denmark