The MONIMEDS - MONitoring MEdical Devices for higher patients' Safety proposal by the team of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano – composed of Prof. Enrico Caiani, Antonella Lombardi (Biomedical Engineering graduate student), Yijun Ren and Riccardo Gibello (Ph.D. students in Data Analytics and Decision Science) – won the 2023 edition of StartCup Lombardia 2023 in the ICT & Services category.

Thanks to this achievement, the team will participate in the finals of the 2023 National Innovation Award, which will be held in Milan on November 30 and December 1.

The business idea at the heart of MONIMEDS is based on the possibility of leveraging medical device safety alerts to support the periodic post-market surveillance activities that manufacturers of such devices are required to carry out as prescribed by the European MDR Regulation (2017/745).

The developed technology is based on results obtained by Prof. Caiani’s team within the CORE-MD European project, of which it represents a profit-driven application.

Through algorithms based on Natural Language Processing methods that categorize the often ignored and incomplete information published by the various national supervisory authorities, MONIMEDS is able to generate a structured and periodically updated database that allows specific searches by country, manufacturer, medical device or device category using the European Medical Device Nomenclature (EMDN).

The result of this search represents useful information for manufacturers to understand the historical/geographical trends of problems associated with medical devices (from the specific case to the macrocategory to which they belong) as well as for an analysis of the risks associated with the production/distribution/sales process, in order to increase patient safety.