Challenge

Heart failure and coronary heart disease require continuous attention to medication, physical activity, diet and changing symptoms. Yet conventonal care relies heavily on occasional clinical appointments, leaving patients with limited support in their daily lives. Deterioration may therefore go unnoticed, while poor adherence to treatment can reduce clinical benefits and contribute to avoidable hospital admissions.

Solutions

HeartCycle addresses the need to connect home-based disease management more closely with professional care. Its focus is not simply collecting measurements remotely, but turning daily health data into timely feedback for patients and useful recommendations for healthcare professionals. The project developed a closed-loop telemonitoring system for people with heart failure and coronary heart disease. Wearable and home-based sensors measured parameters such as weight, blood pressure, heart rate and physical activity.

Automated analysis identified relevant changes and supported clinicians in adjusting personalised care plans. The system combined two connected loops, a patient loop offering daily guidance, education, motivation and feedback, and a professional loop giving clinical teams access to monitoring results, alerts and decision support. Three main applications were developed and clinically investigated: Heart Failure Management, Guided Exercise for cardiac rehabilitation and a patient health-assessment system.

Results

HeartCycle produced and clinically tested an integrated telehealth platform linking patients at home with healthcare professionals . Its heart-failure study enrolled 123 patients across clinical sites in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. The automated coaching programme helped many participating patients adopt recommended behaviours, while the monitoring system detected small changes in vital signs associated with medication, diet and daily activities. T

he Guided Exercise trial also demonstrated encouraging levels of acceptance and perceived usefulness, although technical issues and participant drop-out showed that further development was needed. The project’s socio-economic analysis found that the service could be introduced under different European healthcare and reimbursement needs. Scenario modelling suggested that wider deployment to a modelled population pf 115,000 heart failure patients was projected to avoid around 38,000 admissions and save approximately €107 million annually in hospital and specialist-care costs.