REAFEL – Contextual ECG Monitoring and Atrial Fibrillation Detection in Cardiology

Chronic heart related diseases are a major public health issue and is the leading cause of death and hospitalization for people 65+ years. The goal of the “Reaching the Frail Elderly Patient for Optimizing Diagnosis of Atrial Fibrillation” (REAFEL) project was to design a patient-centric home-monitoring platform for early detection of cardiac rhythm disorders. This would allow for timely intervention and prevention of serious conditions such as stroke and repeated falls.

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Two Major Trends in Digital Health

Today I was invited to give a presentation to the Danish health management organization “Region of Southern Denmark” as part of their strategy conference on digital health.

I used my old paper on “Pervasive healthcare as a scientific discipline” as an outset to discuss where I see healthcare is moving – based (of course) on our research into digital health at DTU Health Tech and CACHET. Here I identify seven major trends, which I still find to be relevant. These seven trends are shown on the slide below (click on the image to download the entire slide deck).

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2nd Generation mHealth for Mental Health

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

I’ve recently been putting together a description of my recent research in mental health. My interest in mental health dates back to the MONARCA project, which has led to a number of interesting results since, especially driven by the data that is still being collected, analysed, and published mainly by Maria Faurholt-Jepsen and Lars V. Kessing.

Now we have been researching the 2nd generation of mHealth technology for mental health as part of the RADMIS project. This has focused on the design of Behavioral Activation Technology, which supports therapeutic support for depressive patients. These technologies show promising results in terms of supporting intervention in mental health and has – in a non-randomized clinical trial – shown a reduction in depressive symptoms.

Behavioral Activation Technology

Behavioral activation is a 3rd generation behavior therapy for treating depression. We have built two different smartphone-based technologies supporting behavioral activation; MORIBUS and MUBS. MORIBUS is an app for patients to plan and track healthy activities designed to be part of BA therapy with a trained therapist, while MUBS utilizes machine learning techniques for recommending healthy activities to patients and is designed to be used stand-alone outside therapy.

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