CARE4CVD

The challenge

Cardiovascular disease management increasingly requires personalised approaches that reflect individual risk profiles and real-world health trajectories. Current clinical risk models, whilst valuable, rely on periodic assessments and population-level statistics that may not capture the dynamic nature of cardiovascular health in individual patients. Traditional monitoring methods provide limited insight into daily cardiovascular health, missing opportunities to detect early deterioration or identify patients who would benefit from intensified prevention strategies. The growing recognition that cardiovascular risk varies substantially between individuals, influenced by genetics, lifestyle, environmental factors and comorbidities, demands more sophisticated approaches to assessment and monitoring.

Healthcare providers need tools that enable truly personalised cardiovascular care, whilst patients would benefit from better understanding of their own risk and the impact of lifestyle modifications. Stakeholders include cardiology departments, primary care providers, patients at risk of cardiovascular events, public health organisations and the broader healthcare system seeking to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease.

The project: ICARE4CVD

Within the ICARE4CVD consortium, TNO contributes expertise in digital biomarker development, data analysis and evidence generation to support personalised cardiovascular care. The consortium brings together international partners from academia, clinical practice and industry, creating a multidisciplinary collaboration focused on transforming cardiovascular prevention and management.

The project integrates digital health technologies with clinical and real-world data to improve risk assessment and monitoring. This integration enables continuous insight into cardiovascular health parameters outside traditional clinical settings, capturing the variability and patterns that emerge in daily life. TNO's role encompasses developing analytical frameworks for digital biomarker validation, applying advanced data analysis methods to identify meaningful patterns in complex datasets, and generating robust evidence that digital measures can improve cardiovascular outcomes. The consortium approach facilitates access to diverse patient populations, clinical expertise and technological platforms, accelerating the development and validation of digital biomarkers for cardiovascular care.

ICARE4CVD aims to enable more tailored cardiovascular prevention and management strategies by generating evidence for digital biomarkers that support personalised decision-making in clinical practice. The project focuses on demonstrating how digital measures can enhance risk stratification, identify patients who would benefit most from specific interventions and monitor treatment response more precisely than conventional approaches. By combining expertise across the cardiovascular care pathway, from prevention through acute management to long-term follow-up, the consortium addresses the full spectrum of opportunities for digital biomarker application.

Looking to the future

Following validation within the consortium, the digital biomarkers developed through ICARE4CVD can be integrated into cardiovascular care pathways across Europe and beyond. Widespread implementation will require collaboration with cardiology societies, primary care organisations and health technology assessment bodies to establish clinical guidelines and reimbursement frameworks.

Future development will focus on refining personalised risk models that incorporate digital biomarker data alongside traditional clinical parameters, potentially enabling earlier intervention and more effective prevention strategies. The evidence base generated through ICARE4CVD will support regulatory pathways for digital health technologies in cardiovascular care, ultimately contributing to reduced cardiovascular events and improved quality of life for patients at risk.