Approximately 10000 people in Lithuania have a stroke every year, with 80 % of them being ischemic. One-third of ischemic strokes are attributed to atrial fibrillation (AF). Another 25 % of ischemic strokes are not assigned to any cause. However, increasing evidence show that asymptomatic AF can be associated with this type of stroke. The risk of recurrent stroke can be reduced by two-thirds if oral anticoagulant therapy is prescribed, which requires confirmation of AF. Recent studies show that other atrial arrhythmias are also associated with an increased risk of AF and stroke. Atrial arrhythmias often progress to more advanced forms, thus treatment success and prevention from severe complications highly depends at what stage of development arrhythmia is detected. Since episodes of atrial arrhythmia are usually short and rare at the beginning of the development, prolonged monitoring is desirable. Nevertheless, existing devices for long-term arrhythmia monitoring are either invasive and expensive or inconvenient for patient. Therefore, it is urgent to develop technologies that could ensure unobtrusive long-term monitoring. Detection of primary arrhythmia episodes is important for scientific research as well – timely detection and monitoring of arrhythmia progression would allow characterization of temporal distribution of atrial arrhythmia episodes and could be useful for finding causal relationships between arrhythmia events and complications. During the project, the developed unobtrusive device will be used to acquire physiological signals for at least 1 month, starting at the Vilnius University Hospital Santaros Klinikos and continued in outpatient. It is expected that the developed technologies for unobtrusive long-term monitoring of atrial arrhythmias will provide a better understanding of arrhythmia progression to more advanced stages, and will be useful for finding a causal relationships between arrhythmia progression and complications.
Project funding:
Projects funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (RCL), Projects carried out by researchers’ teams
Project results:
During the project, signal processing algorithms, hardware and software system will be developed for extended time monitoring of post stroke patients in unobtrusive way. A multisensory smart bracelet will serve as a main component to detect the presence of a co-morbidly dangerous disease – an atrial fibrillation arrhythmia. The developed system will be patented in the State Patent Bureau of the Republic of Lithuania and described in three scientific articles with an impact factor.
Period of project implementation: 2017-10-02 - 2019-12-31
Project coordinator: Vilnius University
Project partners: Kaunas University of Technology
