According to the WHO report “World Health Statistics 2016, Monitoring health for the Sustainable Development Goals,” cardiovascular diseases (CVD) killed 17.5 million people in 2012, which is 3 in every 10 deaths worldwide. Even though early diagnose and periodic monitoring of patients at risk can reduce the impact of CVD, these strategies cannot be afforded by healthcare systems using currently available technologies, which often rely on costly and scarce devices operated by highly trained staff in medical centers.
The Cardiovascular Scale proposed in this project is a technology intended to contribute to the change of paradigm in health care wherein more effort is being devoted to prevention. The proposal is to upgrade common domestic electronic weighing scales by including means to measure and process the ballistocardiogram (BCG), i.e. the vertical forces generated from cardiovascular activity at the heart and the major arteries, from the same force sensors used to measure body weight already present in electronic weighing scales. By processing the BCG it is possible to obtain two key parameters to assess the cardiovascular health status of a subject: Arterial pulse wave velocity (PWV), which reflects the health status of a subject’s arteries and is directly associated to the risk of cardiovascular events such as myocardial infarction or stroke, and PEP/LVET ratio, a reliable indicator of left ventricular function that reflects the heart’s health. In this way, a simple and relatively inexpensive device that is already integrated in many subjects’ daily routine can deliver fast self-administrated periodic checks of cardiovascular health that enable early diagnose and periodic monitoring of patients at risk and at the same time saves displacements to medical centers, costly devices or the assistance of highly trained medical staff.
The technical modifications required to turn an electronic weighing scale into a BCG measurement system represent a small fraction of the cost of the bathroom scale itself hence the Cardiovascular Scale is addressed to the market of users of weighing scales (about $2.4 billion worldwide in 2017), especially those interested in high-end scales with extra features or concerned about their personal healthcare in general and hypertension in particular. Insurance companies and public healthcare systems could also distribute or recommend Cardiovascular Scales in pharmacies or directly to selected individuals at risk in order to reduce health-derived expenses by enabling early diagnose and in-home monitoring of CVD hence releasing funds to tackle other public health challenges. Cardiovascular scales can improve the life quality of healthy and diseased people by reducing displacements to medical centers and by avoiding aggressive therapies due to late disease detection.
The aims of the project are to build a portable prototype to run a preclinical trial to validate the results in a wide and heterogeneous group of normal subjects and patients, and to promote the device among medical staff and end-users at large.
Aquest projecte està cofinançat pel Fons Europeu de Desenvolupament Regional (FEDER)
de la Unió Europea en el marc del Programa operatiu FEDER de Catalunya 2014-2020
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