Hyderabad IIT Researchers have developed a low-power device capable of monitoring electrocardiogram (ECG) and alerting patients and doctors to cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk in real time.
According to a World Health Organization (WHO) survey, cardiovascular diseases top the list of public health concerns over other diseases and have almost become the primary cause of human death. The main causes involve lifestyle change pattern, unhealthy eating habits, tobacco use, low fruit intake, and vegetable intake, lack of physical activity, and a lot of stress.
These factors require the development of a personalized battery-backed CVD monitoring device with a very low form factor to achieve unobtrusiveness that works under the emerging cyber-physical system setup.
Vemishetty Naresh Forms IIT Researchers Team
A team made up of Mr. Vemishetty Naresh investigated this area. Ph.D. Research Scholar, Advanced Embedded Systems and IC Design Laboratory, Electrical Engineering Department, and Dr. Amit Acharyya, Department of Electrical Engineering Associate Professor.
The researchers took healthy and various unhealthy cases from the Physionet database to validate the proposed method as proof of concept demonstration. Their research has recently been published in the international peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, online open access, scientific journal published by prestigious Nature Research.
Speaking about the importance of this research, Dr. Amit Acharyya, said, “CVD is one of the deadliest diseases and irrespective of the economy of the country people are getting affected by it. It is manifested in different forms necessitating the early diagnosis, therapy, and prognosis. Hence the proposed work on the classification is going to be of immense help for the society.”
They also worked on developing and combining various classification techniques to build an universal algorithm. The concept of resource sharing for CVD automation develops a novel system-on-chip (SoC) architecture in a low complex way. Thus the entire system can cover various ECG anomalies and finally come up with a prototype board that looks like a smartphone at the end of the patient.
Naresh Talks About the Benefits
Speaking about their plans to take this research to benefit the society at large, Mr. Vemishetty Naresh said: “There was an exponential increment in human mortality rate. This is due to the delayed diagnosis, lack of proper distribution of health care facilities. Also, because of prognosis centers in the vicinity. There is a need of a robust automated device. This is for the early detection of the vital abnormal ECG signals in chronic CVD patients.”
Access to CVD services in India is relatively poor. This is because India’s primary health care system has focused largely on treating transmissible diseases, maternal and child health care. The integration of CVD preventive care in primary healthcare centers in India requires special attention. So, taking that into account the statistics of CVD deaths, with the need for innovative models in health promotion.
Thus, there is tremendous challenge for portable personal health analysis, cardiovascular disease. So, monitoring systems have gained significant importance in recent years. Further, considering portable remote monitoring, it is necessary to develop a remote low-form factor CVD device . Also, it consumes minimal power for prolonged battery life. Moreover, tThe device should be sufficiently reliable to extract significant clinical features. So, this is for classification and prediction of cardiovascular diseases at an affordable cost.
So, this work was partly supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. Also, this is under the ‘ Internet of Things (IoT), Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems (ICPS)Programme, ‘. Also, with the project entitled ‘ IOT-based holistic prevention and prediction of CVD I ‘
