R&D Cardio

INESC TEC has a research line focus on advanced human sensing that has a strong component in cardiac sensing. Our research in this area goes from the research and development of new ECG, auscultation and multimodal systems (including capacity electrodes and combination of different cardiac signals) to the most advanced deep learning architectures to screen, diagnose and monitor cardiac diseases. The two main output until now on this area:

1- Creation of a start-up named Biodevices S.A. which was the first company to design and produce the first wearable medical textile device with medical certification for cardiac monitoring. This system compromises a full hardware and software-based system to analyzed the ECG signal and provide clear and easy to read report for the clinicians.

2- Our Multiscope researchers (Miguel Coimbra and Francesco Renna) are responsible for organizing the 2022 George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge, making open-source one of the largest auscultation dataset for research. This area also won the best poster presentation on 2021 Computing in Cardiology and a prize of the best oral presentation on RECPAD2021 conference.

Beside these main achievements we are pursuing new research areas in cardiology, namely in atrial fibrillation with pacemaker patients and in ultrasound image analysis with the research of new deep learning architectures to reach enhanced results by applying the strong background on medical image analysis from more than 30y. We are also strongly commit in researching new MIoT systems that make use of wearable devices and web&mobile platform to improve screening and monitoring of patients in point-of-care or at home. INESC TEC strong knowledge in ECG signal is also leading to the design of innovation signal processing and features extraction algorithms, including two methodologies that make use of the ECG waveform morphology (fiducial points) were patented.

As partners we can also bring clinical and industrial partners in this area namely national reference clinical centers in cardiology and associations.

INESC TEC strong research and innovation capabilities are only possible due to a strong infrastructure of systems (open source data repository, unique cardiac monitoring devices, high power computing center, …) and services that we also are able to bring to the consortium, such as our ethical and data management offices and also our Intellectual property and business creation management departments.