Care@Home – Wearable Remote Monitoring for Heart Failure

Cardiac Care@Home is a wearable heart failure monitoring system that gives clinicians continuous insight into a patient’s condition at home, so they can intervene before symptoms escalate.

Sector: Digital Health & Medical Device Development
Technology: Textile Biosignal Wearables, ECG & Bio-Impedance Sensors, Remote Patient Management, Machine Learning
Partners: MiBida, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Radboudumc, by-wire.net

OPZuid EFRO 2021-2027 logo
Co-funded by the European Union logo

CardiacCare@Home (project name Care@Home) is co-funded by OPZuid (European Regional Development Fund, EFRO 2021–2027) and the European Union, with support from the province of Noord-Brabant.

The Challenge

More than two million people in the Netherlands live with a chronic condition such as heart failure, diabetes or COPD. Heart failure alone accounts for around 40,000 hospital admissions and roughly €800 million in healthcare costs every year, and nearly a quarter of patients discharged after an admission are readmitted within 30 days.

Today’s care is built on snapshots: a blood pressure reading at a quarterly check-up, a symptom recalled from memory. Yet the physiological changes that precede a serious exacerbation – rising heart rate and reduced variability, falling thoracic bio-impedance, increasing filling pressures – build silently for two to three weeks before a patient notices anything is wrong.

Consumer wearables cannot close this gap: they are not clinically validated, typically measure only one or two parameters, and raise real questions about where patient data ends up. Medically validated alternatives exist but come with trade-offs. Invasive implants such as CardioMEMS track filling pressure effectively, but cost around €10,000 per patient and reach only a few hundred of the roughly 246,000 heart failure patients in the Netherlands. Disposable electrodes and patches avoid surgery but irritate skin and need replacing every 5–10 days – impractical for the months or years of monitoring chronic disease management actually requires.

CardiacCare@Home wearable ECG and bio-impedance sensor worn on a chest strap for remote heart failure monitoring
The CardiacCare@Home sensor worn on a chest strap — designed to be worn like ordinary clothing, for months at a time.

The Solution: A Consortium Effort

Cardiac Care@Home is developing the first medically validated, non-invasive wearable heart failure monitoring textile able to track the biomarkers that matter most for heart failure – ECG, bio-impedance and PPG/SpO2-derived parameters such as heart rate variability, Pre-Ejection Period, Left Ventricular Ejection Time and Stroke Volume – continuously, for months at a time, fully integrated with hospital telehealth infrastructure. Five partners bring the expertise required:

  • 2M Engineering (Valkenswaard, lead partner) develops the wearable’s sensor hardware, building on its existing PCARDIO biosignal sensor platform and prior MIT R&D experience with the HeartGuard project, and leads medical validation and certification of the system.
  • MiBida (Eindhoven) contributes its secure Remote Patient Management platform – already deployed with hospitals including TU/e, Máxima MC, Catharina Ziekenhuis and Radboudumc – and develops the machine-learning algorithms that turn raw sensor data into early-warning clinical insight, integrating with hospital systems such as HL7, HiX and EPIC.
  • by-wire.net (Eindhoven) designs the textile garment itself: a comfortable, washable T-shirt/vest form factor rather than a band or adhesive patch, engineered to stay in place and keep sensor contact for months of daily wear.
  • Technische Universiteit Eindhoven contributes technical research expertise in sensing, signal processing and algorithm development.
  • Radboudumc, together with two other clinical partners leads clinical validation – recruiting 150 heart failure patients across three hospitals to test the research prototype and train the detection algorithms against real hospitalization events.
Wearable health patch
The P-Cardio biosignal sensor — the sensing technology at the core of the wearable.

How Wearable Heart Failure Monitoring Works

The wearable continuously captures ECG, bio-impedance and PPG/SpO2 signals during normal daily activity – no clinic visit required. Algorithms convert this raw signal into clinically meaningful parameters and transmit it securely to MiBida’s Remote Patient Management platform, where machine-learning models trained on real exacerbation data are designed to flag early warning signs, aiming for two to three weeks of lead time before a patient would otherwise notice symptoms. Clinicians see the trend directly inside their existing hospital systems and can intervene early – adjusting medication remotely – well before a decline turns into an emergency room visit.

Care@Home remote patient management workflow: wearable sensor data shared with clinicians via a telehealth platform
From continuous wearable measurement to remote clinical intervention — before a hospital visit is needed.

Sensor components

A single garment, eight physiological signals — captured continuously, without a clinic visit.

Why It Matters

Cardiac Care@Home’s wearable heart failure monitoring is targeting outcomes comparable to invasive monitoring – non-invasively, and at a fraction of the cost. In a published clinical study of the invasive comparator, CardioMEMS reduced heart-failure-related readmissions by 44% and improved KCCQ quality-of-life scores by 7.1 points, against a 0.8-point decline in the control group – a clinically meaningful difference.

Because the Care@Home platform is non-invasive, textile-based and reusable for months rather than days, it is designed to bring that level of insight to the full population of heart failure patients, not only the small group who currently have access to an invasive implant. The underlying platform and data infrastructure are also built to extend beyond heart failure to other chronic conditions such as COPD and obstructive sleep apnea.

The patient-facing companion app translates sensor data into simple traffic-light guidance — green, amber or red — so patients know when to act.
The patient-facing companion app translates sensor data into simple traffic-light guidance — green, amber or red — so patients know when to act.

Traffic Light Guidance

Simple. Clear. Actionable.

Impact

  • Validating the research prototype with 150 heart failure patients across three Dutch hospitals
  • Targeting a 20-40% reduction in heart-failure-related hospital readmissions
  • Potential €60-180 million per year in Dutch healthcare cost savings from avoided admissions
  • Designed for months-to-years of continuous wear, versus 5-10 days for disposable patches and electrodes
  • Built on a platform architected to extend to other chronic conditions, including COPD and obstructive sleep apnea
  • Strengthens the digital health and wearable-sensor innovation ecosystem in Zuid-Nederland

This project reflects how 2M Engineering works: bringing together the right partners – sensor hardware, software, textile engineering and clinical science – to turn complex medical monitoring challenges into working, market-ready wearable devices.

2M Engineering designs and industrializes advanced medical and industrial sensor technology, partnering with companies and research institutions to bring first-of-a-kind diagnostic and monitoring devices to market.

Contact us to discuss licensing, co-development or integration of the Cardiac Care@Home wearable heart failure monitoring platform.