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INNOVATION
An Operational and methodological model for Diabetic Foot Ulcer monitoring
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Market Maturity: Tech Ready
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Market Creation Potential
This innovation was assessed by the JRC’s Market Creation Potential indicator framework as having a High” level of Market Creation Potential. Only innovations that are showing multiple signals of market creation potential are assigned a value under this indicator system. Learn more
Women-led innovation
A woman had a leadership role in developing this innovation in at least one of the Key Innovator organisations listed below.
Go to Market needs
Needs that, if addressed, can increase the chances this innovation gets to (or closer to) the market incude:
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UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDG)
This innovation contributes to the following SDG(s)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 3
Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

The UN explains: "Significant strides have been made in increasing life expectancy and reducing some of the common killers responsible for child and maternal mortality.

Major progress has also been made on increasing access to clean water and sanitation, reducing malaria, tuberculosis, polio and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

However, many more efforts are needed to control a wide range of diseases and address many different persistent and emerging health issues."

The EU-funded Research Project
This innovation was developed under the Horizon 2020 project PHOOTONICS with an end date of 30/06/2024
  • Read more about this project on CORDIS
Description of Project PHOOTONICS
Early prediction and management of Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs) is an important health factor of Europe. Recent clinical trials have concluded that NIR sensing captures oxy(deoxy)haemoglobin (HbO2, Hb) and peripheral/ tissue oxygen saturations (StO2, SpO2), thermal Infrared-IR detects hyperthermia, among Regions of Interest (ROIs) and Mid-IR contains rich information about the proteomics, lipidomics and metabolomics (e.g., glucose). All these medical indices are important factors for early prediction of DFU. Current medical approaches are i) invasive (e.g., skin lesion biopsy), ii) requires consumables, and iii) being operated by certified physicians (e.g., ultrasound and/or biopsy). PHOOTONICS aims at developing a non-invasive, reliable and cost-effective photonics-driven device for DFU monitoring and management which can be applied for wide use. The project supports two versions: (i) the PHOOTONICS In-Home, used for DFU monitoring by patients and (ii) the PHOOTONICS PRO operated by physicians. Reliability is achieved by optimizing i) passive Hyperspectral (HIS) NIR photo-detector, with an active tuneable diode illuminator for detecting SpO2/StO2, HbO2 and Hb, ii) a thermal-IR sensor of detecting hyperthermia/hypothermia distributions in ROIs and iii) a passive Mid-IR sensing with a Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) optimized to capture additional tissue attributes such as proteomics (elastin, collagen) and metabolomics (glucose). Cost-effectiveness is achieved by introducing i) targeted photonics technologies for DFU, ii) implementing advanced signal processing/learning algorithms to increase the discrimination accuracy while maintaining hardware cost-benefit, (iii) developing a user-friendly framework operated by non-certified physicians, and even by patients (for the In-Home version), and (iv) minimising operational cost with our non-invasive device. Clinical studies are performed to validate the reliability of the new cost-effective device in real-life settings.

Innnovation Radar's analysis of this innovation is based on data collected on 17/09/2024.
The unique id of this innovation in the European Commission's IT systems is: 126161