InSiDe, a European R&D project targeting mobile early-stage cardiovascular disease diagnosis and monitoring

Imec and Ghent University, together with Medtronic and key project partners including Tyndall, announced the launch of the H2020 project InSiDe. The purpose of InSiDe is to provide access for the medical community to a mobile diagnostic device to identify and characterize different stages of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). The device offers fast, flexible and patient-friendly monitoring of CVD, allowing patients to remain in their home environment while still being closely checked and where timely intervention can occur when necessary.

The principle of the device is Laser Doppler Vibrometry (LDV): a low-power laser is directed towards the skin overlying an artery. The skin’s vibration amplitude and frequency, resulting from the heartbeat, are extracted from the Doppler shift of the reflected beam.  The key underlying technology is silicon photonics, which allows the implementation of advanced optical functionality in a chip produced in a CMOS fab environment.

 

Pádraic Morrissey, Pilot Line Technology Manager, PIXAPP, Tyndall sheds some light on Tyndall’s involvement in the project:

“Manufacturing high volumes of PICs, or optical integrated circuits, is very expensive, but what really drives the cost of using them in any photonic device is how they are connected to the real world. In the Photonics Packaging Group at Tyndall, we have the capability to design, integrate, and develop fully working research prototypes from these PICs. Our role in the InSiDe project is to take this one step further, where we are developing wafer level photonic packaging and assembly technologies that can create a truly manufacturable photonic product. Our goal is to create a mobile, affordable, point-of-care screening device that can be used by GPs world-wide to diagnose the different stages of cardiovascular diseases, using state-of-the-art photonics packaging.”

Discover more about this project here.