The European Community concerted action on ambulatory monitoring

The diffusion of instruments for ambulatory monitoring is rapidly expanding and the related cost to the European Community is increasing, while their role and their effectiveness are still controversial. The Biomedical Engineering Group, belonging to the Committee for Medical Research of the European Community, has approved a project for the co-ordination of the research ('concerted action') in the field of ambulatory monitoring, to tackle the problem. The project, directed by a Project Management Group, following some meetings of experts being organized to identify high-priority goals, has been aimed at promoting common efforts in two specific fields: evaluation of the quality of ECG ambulatory monitoring analysers, by means of a standard reference, and assessment of the performance of non-invasive techniques for arterial blood pressure ambulatory monitoring. In its first six months (July-December 1985) the project has produced: (1) a preliminary agreement about ECG recording and an annotation scheme, to be definitely adopted, after a pilot experiment, by June 1986; (2) a protocol for hypertensive patient characterization and data collection, to be initiated by September 1986.