Heart Failure-Chip. Wearable biosensor to diagnose and monitor heart failure

Inés Mendes Pinto

Laboratorio Ibérico Internacional de Nanotecnología, Braga, Portugal

Heart failure (HF) affects at least 26 million people worldwide, who will frequently need to visit a hospital for venous blood sample collection to monitor their condition. Detecting biomarkers in readily available body fluids would enable an earlier diagnosis and more frequent monitoring of HF.

The clinical manifestations of heart failure (HF) are often nonspecific and the growing concern about mortality and morbidity rates has driven the demand for rapid, portable, and inexpensive biosensing devices. Measuring clinically-relevant biomarkers in readily available body fluids represents an unmet need for the improvement of early diagnosis and monitoring of HF patients. This has triggered the development of point-of-care (POC) tests to accelerate decision-making for an individual at risk of developing heart disorder without the need for hospital visits and expensive laboratory tests.

HF-chip is cheaper and more sensitive than conventional technologies; can be incorporated in clinical trials for high-throughput HF screening and monitoring, and include physician-supervised and/or algorithm-based self-management at distance.

The HF-chip project is currently positioned at TRL 3, as an initial proof of concept was demonstrated in vitro and in vivo trials.