iCARDEA Kick-off Meeting has been held in Salzburg, Austria on February 9-10, 2010 with great success. 

iCARDEA Press Release

According to consensus statement¹ prepared jointly by the Heart Rhythm Society and the European Heart Rhythm Association, more than 800,000 patients in Europe have Cardiovascular Implantable Electronic Devices (CIEDs) for the treatment or secondary prevention of cardiac arrhythmias. In addition, the number of follow-up visits for patients with an implanted cardiac device exceeds 5.8 million visits each year, and that number will continue to increase as more devices are implanted. The exponential growth rate of cardiac device implantation calls for new methods of long-term surveillance with a view to optimizing patient safety and care, alleviating the burden of caregivers, and lowering health care costs through ICT support.

The EU co-funded project "iCARDEA: An Intelligent Platform for Personalized Remote Monitoring of the Cardiac Patients with Electronic Implant Devices" will address this challenge, by exploiting competencies of 8 partners from 5 different EU countries, co-ordinated by the SRDC Ltd. The project is initiated through its Kick-off meeting held in Salzburg, Austria, on February 9-10, 2010. The activities will last 36 months, with a cost of 3,613,448 Euros, 2,539,833 Euros of which is Commission funding.

iCARDEA project will expose CIED data through standard interfaces to develop an intelligent platform to semi-automate the follow-up of the CIED patients with context-aware, adaptable computer interpretable clinical guideline models. EHR interoperability will be achieved by exposing legacy EHR systems through standard HL7 CDA R2 interfaces so that information about patients’ medical history such as the non-cardiac conditions denoting contraindications to the proposed therapies can be obtained from the patient EHR data and used in the clinical follow-up workflow. In addition to EHRs and CIED data, the system will also consume the patient data entered via patients in order to achieve accurate decision making which takes into account user impressions and experience that may not be detected via CIEDs or embedded in EHRs. The Personal Health Record (PHR) system to be developed by iCARDEA will enable patients to access and coordinate their health information to gain the benefits of having their healthcare records and CIED data in a format easily accessible to them. The PHR system will also be used for feedback and the education of the patient.

iCARDEA will improve the care and follow-up of patients with CIEDs by integrating CIED data to the automated follow up processes through computer interpretable clinical guideline models and adaptable healthcare planners and hence will provide improved disease management at the point of need. With its clinical guideline based automated analysis and monitoring platform, iCARDEA will reduce the workload of clinical staff in healthcare settings (electrophysiology or other care settings responsible for follow-ups and monitoring) and hence provide economic benefits for health systems using CIED devices.

Coordinator contact details:
Prof. Dr. Asuman Dogac,
General Manager       
Software Research, Development and Consultation (SRDC) Ltd.
ODTU Teknopark, Silikon Bina, Kat 1, No. 14
Middle East Technical University Campus      
06531 Ankara Turkey  
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it                  
Web:  http://www.srdc.com.tr/~asuman/  
Phone: +90 (312) 210 1393, 210 1763
Fax: +90 (312) 210 1837

¹ HRS/EHRA Expert Consensus on the Monitoring of Cardiovascular Implantable Electronic Devices (CIED): Description of Techniques, Indications, Personnel, Frequency and Ethical Considerations