A Medical Device Daily

Royal Philips Electronics (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) reported that it will lead a new European Union (EU)-funded research project aimed at improving care of heart patients through the development of what the company terms “innovative telemonitoring solutions.”

The HeartCycle project, which follows the successful MyHeart project in the EU, was launched on March 1, and will be one of the largest biomedical and healthcare research projects within the EU.

Public and private partners from 18 academic, industrial, medical and research organizations from nine different European countries and China will team up in the project.

HeartCycle will run for four years and has a budget of some €21 million, of which about €14 million will be funded by the European Union as part of the EU 7th Framework Program.

According to Philips, participants in the HeartCycle consortium “will work to improve the quality of care for coronary heart disease and heart failure patients by developing systems for monitoring their condition at home and involving them in the daily management of their disease.”

The systems will involve unobtrusive sensors built into patients’ clothing or bedsheets and home appliances such as weight scales and blood pressure monitors.

The consortium’s goal is to develop dedicated software that analyzes the acquired data, and that can be programmed to provide feedback on the patient’s health status, plus his or her adherence to prescribed therapies and progress toward achieving health milestones.

It also aims to develop mechanisms to report relevant data back to clinicians automatically so that they can prescribe personalized therapies and lifestyle recommendations.

Cardiovascular disease kills around 1.9 million people every year in the EU, with the associated annual health costs estimated at €105 billion. Around half of these deaths occur in people who have previously had a heart attack, most of whom will develop heart failure before they die.

There are currently around 10 million heart failure patients in the EU and it is one of the commonest medical reasons for hospitalization in adults. Finding better ways to manage and treat coronary heart disease and chronic heart failure is therefore seen as one of the most effective ways of reducing the human cost and financial burden of these debilitating conditions.

“The greatest challenge and opportunity for the management of long-term medical conditions is to help patients to help themselves,” said Professor John Cleland, MD, head of the department of cardiology at the University of Hull in the UK, past chairman of both the Working Group on Heart Failure of the European Society of Cardiology and of the British Society for Heart Failure, and chief medical officer of the HeartCycle project.

“Investing directly in people who need help, and not just in services that do things to or for them, makes sense in terms of improved care, greater affordability and the effective deployment of scarce nursing and medical resources,” Cleland said.

Henk van Houten, senior vice president of Philips Research and head of the Healthcare Research program, said, “By developing systems that remotely monitor heart patients and motivate them to adhere to treatment regimes and adopt beneficial lifestyles, we hope to improve the survival of people with heart disease as well as to contain the overall cost of care. The development of such systems can only be achieved efficiently via multi-disciplinary partnerships between hardware engineers, software engineers, textile manufacturers, industrial designers, clinical experts and healthcare providers, as is the case in the HeartCycle project.”

According to Philips, the earlier MyHeart project in the EU “developed advanced telemonitoring technologies and service concepts to enable people to play an active role in maintaining their health.”

It said that in the course of that project, home-based disease management was identified as a potential opportunity for improving medical standards of care and added that the HeartCycle project “aims to extend this disease management concept for specific patient groups, with a focus on improving patient compliance to medication and lifestyle therapies.”

Incontinence company boosting capacity

SCA (Stockholm, Sweden), which characterizes itself as “the world-leading provider of incontinence care products,” said that it is investing to boost its capacity in the European incontinence care segment.

To keep pace with what it said is “powerful growth in demand for heavy incontinence products,” SCA is investing in a new production line for its TENA Pants line at its plant in Hoogezand and a new line for TENA Flex at the plant in Gennep, both in the Netherlands.

The company said the investment at Hoogezand is “primarily aimed at supporting strong growth in Europe, where sales in the Pants segment are outpacing global growth in the segment.” The total investment at that site will amount to €16.7 million, and the plant is scheduled to go into operation by the end of 2009.

The investment at the Gennep facility will amount to €19.8 million and also is designed mainly to satisfy rising growth in Europe, SCA said. The Flex products are sold primarily to hospitals and nursing homes and the segment is most developed in Europe, where SCA is the market leader. The new production line will be started up in 3Q09.

German distributor signed by Remedent

Remedent (Deurle, Belgium), a company focused on oral care and cosmetic dentistry products, said it has signed BriteDent to serve as organized to act as Glamsmile’s exclusive distributor in Germany of Remedent’s Glamsmile veneers, which the company calls “a revolutionary cosmetic dental system that substantially expands the consumer and professional dental market for veneers.”

Guy De Vreese, Remedent chairman, said, “Germany is the third announced international market opportunity for Remedent and one of the largest so far. We are continuing our marketing efforts and expect further signed agreements in the near future.”