The ‘Invisibles’ project aims to develop health status monitoring sensors that can be placed on everyday objects.

According to the researcher Hugo Plácido da Silva, the main objective of the ‘Invisibles’ project is to break some of the barriers that currently exist in the early detection and monitoring of the health status of users in their daily lives.

“Historically, for someone to have a diagnosis of pathology it was necessary to do an examination in a hospital context with specialized equipment and inconvenient instruments. Nowadays, what has been seen is the successive breaking of several of these barriers, using equipment such as a smartwatch to take a 10-second electrocardiogram as part of a user's daily life”, he says.

The problem is that these devices, the so-called wearables, currently have a high abandonment rate, either because the person forgets to use them, or because they stop taking measurements after some time.

In this sense, the ‘Invisibles’ project seeks to eliminate these barriers by integrating the sensors into everyday objects such as a computer keyboard, thus allowing an electrocardiogram to be performed without any additional procedure as an extension of each user's daily activity.

“We have this principle of breaking down barriers and promoting early detection, ensuring that some problems that could develop into serious cardiac complications can be detected in a timely manner”, he reinforces.

About Hugo Plácido da Silva:

Hugo is an award-winning inventor, researcher, and entrepreneur, having co-founded multiple innovative technology-based companies, operating in the fields of biomedical devices and data science for healthcare and quality of life. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computers Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon (UL), and is a researcher at the IT - Instituto de Telecomunicações since 2004. He is also one of the co-founders of PLUX – Wireless Biosignals, S.A. (http://www.plux.info). Both at a technical and scientific level, he has actively contributed to and participated in more than 50 national and international projects. He is an IEEE Senior Member since 2018 and IEEE Member since 2010, affiliated with the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Furthermore, he is an active member of the IEEE EMBS Portugal Chapter, where he currently holds the Vice-Chair position.

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