Medical devices have a fundamental role in saving lives by providing innovative healthcare solutions for the diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, prediction, prognosis, treatment or alleviation of disease.

In the previous solution there was a Wireless Sensor System (WSN) based on tree topology, that consists of sensor units and a base station acting as a gateway to a web platform. Wireless Sensor Units (WSUs) were used to get environmental data such as temperature, humidity, soil humidity, etc., which are sent to a base station named Wireless Information Unit (WIU) through a Zigbee.

The medical devices sector is essential to the provision of healthcare to citizens and is an important player in both the European and global economy.

One of the proposed improvements was the replacement of WSUs existing microcontroller with such consuming ultra low power.

Another improvement was to update the communication technology used in the WIU, such as Nb-IoT, in order to improve bandwidth, reduce communication cost and increase the battery duration.

Objectives

An SME wants to investigate whether an expert system using machine learning algorithms and IoT can be integrated on IoT devices to produce an innovative system (FUTURE-MD) that will dramatically improve safety and accuracy of medical devices that are already used in healthcare institutions and that has commercial opportunities.

Challenges

Medical devices have a fundamental role in saving lives by providing innovative healthcare solutions for the diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, prediction, prognosis, treatment or alleviation of disease. The medical devices sector is essential to the provision of healthcare to citizens and is an important player in both the European and global economy.

Generating data:
• Device related parameters
• Parameters of electrical safety of the device
• Parameters of performance of the device

Main challenge: How to understand the present, manage the challenge and predict the future

Technology

Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are transforming health care by deriving new and important insights from the vast amount of data generated during the delivery of health care every day. Medical device manufacturers are using these technologies to innovate their products to better assist health care providers and improve patient care.

Market

• Digitized agriculture is a huge and continuously growing market. The increasing demand for agricultural food products, the shift in consumer preferences for higher standards of food safety and quality, and unavailability of laborers, are some of the driving factors of the market.
• Our beachhead market is in the area of Balkans (Bulgaria, Greece) where the climate conditions can ease the agricultural process, but given the cloud nature of the system proposed it can be applied to any market in the world.
• The proposed system for smart farming, that supports both demand driven and automated irrigation, sensor networks, has a big impact on water, energy and food efficiency.

Consortium