“The initiative came from pediatric heart surgeon Tommi Pätilä. He saw that there was room for improvement in the ways patients are monitored during operations. Individual differences between patients were being ignored while the surgical teams were forced to rely mainly on aggregate data while monitoring each patient. As a contrary approach, evidence-based medicine is a rapidly growing trend, and our innovation pushes it forward,” explains Kalle Kotilahti, Biodesign project manager and PhD in biomedical engineering from Aalto University.
”We are developing a sensor technology that would provide the surgeon measured, real-time data on the condition of the patient’s cardiac muscle,” sums up Sami Elamo, both MD in orthopedics and traumatology and M.Sc.
In surgical use, the team’s measurement technology could speed up patients’ recovery, enhance their quality of life afterwards, and downright save hundreds of lives every year.
“Globally, a million open heart surgeries are carried out every year, so obviously there is a great demand for technology that could improve the quality of operations – and a market the size of hundreds of millions of euros,” estimates Jari Rantala, M.Sc. and innovation expert.
Jari Rantala is also an advisor at Aalto Start-Up Center.
Read the full article on aalto.fi.