Heart failure (HF) is one of the major health challenges faced by society today, afflicting 6 million Americans, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives each year and costing more than $30 billion dollars annually [1].

With the support of a five-year, $2.86 million R01 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and Northwestern University are working to address this issue by building wearable and weighing-scale-based ballistocardiogram (BCG) technology for monitoring HF patients at home. This technology quantifies mechanical aspects of cardiovascular function by recording the movements of the body caused by the contraction of the heart and ejection of blood into the aorta, the body’s main trunk of the arterial system.

“The ultimate goal of this research is to create an unobtrusive wearable system for continuously monitoring HF patients at home, automatically assessing their risk of experiencing a cardiac event, and providing feedback to caregivers and the patients themselves,” said Omer Inan, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Published by Gatech.edu