NADHJA – Development of a miniaturized measurement system for non-invasive detection of the acute individual metabolic state using artificial intelligence

Lactate diagnostics is particularly important in sports medicine performance diagnostics and has been carried out conventionally for almost 100 years using blood samples and laboratory analyses.

This project aims to develop a measurement method and functional model of a mobile device based on the NADHJA analyzer from mfd Diagnostics GmbH, which uses a fluorescence-optical method and artificial intelligence (AI) to non-invasively determine changes in the concentration of the intracellular coenzyme NADH. The aim is to prove that these NADH changes correlate both with the accumulation of lactate at the site of measurement and with the systemic lactate change.

For the first time such a device would revolutionize lactate diagnostics in sports practice and open up the possibility of measuring lactate concentration non-invasively and continuously in real time. Biological waste is completely avoided. The development could also analyze atypical metabolic conditions, such as those that occur in fatigue syndrome, sepsis and long COVID, and thus enable new therapeutic approaches.

We are looking forward to this exciting joint project with the project partners of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Institute for Information Processing Technology (ITIV), the Institute for Sport and Sports Science (IfSS) and the Mannheim Institute for intelligent Systems in Medicine (MIISM) of the University Medical Center Mannheim (UMM). We would like to thank the performance diagnostics department of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim for their valuable support.

The project is supported by our location in Mannheim and funded by the state of Baden-Württemberg through the investBW program. We would like to thank the state of Baden-Württemberg for funding this project.