FirstLine – Safe medical sensors and personalized analysis for primary care
The FirstLine project brings together four Dutch partners, TNO , Sensible, dHealthIQ and Secuped, to build a secure and open ecosystem for medical sensors used in primary care at home. Together, the consortium combining public and private partners investigates how sensors for, among others, glucose monitoring, foot ulcer prevention and lifestyle tracking can exchange data safely and reliably within a single open standard to support the future of personalized healthcare.
More than 1.1 million people in the Netherlands live with type 2 diabetes, with over 50,000 new diagnoses every year, and global numbers exceeding 550 million. An additional 1.4 million are living with pre-diabetes. Home monitoring with wearable sensors holds great promise for earlier intervention, but today’s sensor systems are fragmented and do not communicate securely across devices and healthcare platforms. This creates risks for data privacy and integrity and means that valuable signals go undetected in the noise until complications have already developed and heavier treatment regimens are needed.
FirstLine addresses this by designing sensor networks from the ground up with secure connectivity and analytics built in at every layer. The consortium develops guidelines, software components and a demonstration environment in which several sensor types work together safely. TNO leads the scientific research and risk analysis. Sensible and SecuPed jointly develop the cloud platform, software development kit, and the hardware and firmware components that connect physical sensors to the shared standard. dHealthIQ integrates everything into a frontend for care professionals, tested within Dutch primary care pathways for diabetes.
The project will deliver a validated security architecture for medical sensor networks, interoperability modules for safe data exchange across different hardware platforms and connectivity standards, a working demonstration system tested with healthcare stakeholders, and a freely accessible research report with concrete guidelines for sensor and software developers. These results are directly applicable to other small and medium-sized companies in health technology, enabling broader adoption of secure home monitoring across the Netherlands and beyond. Read more (in Dutch).
