Cardiac status assessment with a multi-signal device for improved home-based congestive heart failure management

State-of-the-Art disease management for Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients is still based on easy-to-acquire measures such as heart rate (HR), weight and blood pressure (BP). However, these measures respond late to changes of the patient health status and provide limited information to personalize and adapt medication therapy. This paper describes our concept called "Cardiac Status Assessment" we have been investigating within the European project "HeartCycle" towards next-generation home-based disease management of CHF. In our concept we analyze non-invasive surrogate measures of the cardio-vascular function in particular systolic time intervals and pulse wave characteristics to estimate Cardiac Output (CO) and Systemic Vascular Resistance (SVR) both are established clinical measures. We discuss the underlying concept, a developed measurement system and first results.