About Ubimon

The last decade has witnessed a rapid surge of interest in new sensing and monitoring devices for healthcare. One key development in this area is implantable in vivo monitoring and intervention devices. While the problem of long-term stability and biocompatibility is being addressed, several promising clinical prototypes are starting to emerge. For example, in the case of managing patients with acute diabetes, the blood glucose level can be monitored continuously in vivo, which controls the insulin delivery from an implanted reservoir. For the treatment of epilepsy and other debilitating neurological disorders, there are already on the market implantable, multiprogrammable brain stimulators which save the patient from surgical operations of removing brain tissue. In cardiology, the value of implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) has increasingly been recognized for the effective prevention of sudden cardiac death (SCD). In Europe 900,000 patients die suddenly each year and about ninety percent of these deaths are caused by an arrhythmogenic event. Disturbingly, many arrhythmogenic deaths could be prevented if ICD implantation had been made available when the risk of SCD was identified. It is possible to envisage a large percentage of the population having permanent implants which would provide continuous monitoring of the most important physiological parameters for identifying the precursors of major adverse cardiac events including sudden death.  Such technological development echoes the social, industrial, and clinical perspectives of future healthcare delivery.

Objectives

• Techniques for portable communicator interactions with implantable sensors and interventional devices.
• Wearable communicator performing multi-sensor interfacing.
• Automated techniques for integrating multi-sensory data leading to an intervention strategy.
• Preliminary clinical evaluation for management of patients with ischaemic and arrhythmic heart disease.

Primary Deliverables

• Novel micro-power circulatory for fully integrated sensory processing.
• Incorporation of ambient sensors, context awareness for improved sensing and episode detection
• Intelligent data fusion and mining for reliable prediction of critical events

Technical innovations

• Low power sensor coupling and telemetry suitable for long term implants
• Context aware and adapt to environment changes
• Integrated local processing with remote long term trend analysis
• Multi-sensory fusion and data mining with prediction for critical events

UbiMon is aimed at addressing general issues related to using wearable and implantable sensors for distributed mobile monitoring. As an exemplar, the value of the research is to be demonstrated in the management of patients with arrhythmic heart disease. This is motivated by the fact that cardiovascular disease remains the major cause of mortality and morbidity in the industrialised world despite significant progress in its prevention and treatment. Clinically, there is a growing need for continuous monitoring under natural physiological states of the patient so that transient but life threatening abnormalities to be detected or predicted. We will also investigate in parallel the use of implantable sensors for post surgical care, especially in conjunction with minimal access surgery.UbiMon represents a coherent cross-disciplinary integration of different expertise of the consortium, bringing together computing, electronics, bioengineering and medicine.