Category: South Africa

Committed to driving customer value and growth by combining world-class IT and OT expertise from Hitachi Energy and Hitachi Vantara within expanded Lumada portfolio

Zurich, Switzerland, May 23, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501) today announced the launch of Lumada Inspection Insights, its end-to-end portfolio of digital solutions for the inspection, monitoring, and optimization of critical assets. Pioneered by Hitachi Energy and Hitachi Vantara, Lumada Inspection Insights enables customers to automate asset inspection, support sustainability goals, improve physical security, and reduce risks and impacts related to storms or fires by using powerful artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze photographs and video, including LiDAR, thermal and satellite imagery.

The launch of the new portfolio is fully aligned with Hitachi’s Mid-term Management Plan 2024 announced last month by Keiji Kojima, President & CEO, Hitachi, Ltd. In the Plan, Hitachi has set out its growth strategy and commitment to strengthening its digital and green portfolio, which is centered on the Lumada ecosystem. Central to Hitachi’s commitment to social innovation, the Lumada ecosystem is accelerating the journey towards sustainable society through the data-driven cycle of value co-creation with customers. The company is also focused on growing its IT/OT/Products business through constant portfolio transformation.

The new Lumada Inspection Insights portfolio addresses various root causes of failures and forced shutdowns by deploying AI and machine learning (ML) to analyze a wide spectrum of image types, assets and risks. Predictive analytics assesses the risks to operations or environment, and organizations can streamline remediation before outages occur. Available as a comprehensive solution or standalone, the portfolio’s four core applications are Hitachi Image Based Inspections, Hitachi Intelligent Infrastructure Monitoring, Hitachi Vegetation Manager, and Hitachi Map. These represent the company’s latest advancements in its growing Data Operations (DataOps) and Industrial IoT offerings. More information on each solution is below.

Massimo Danieli, Managing Director of Hitachi Energy’s Grid Automation business, said, “The energy transition is one of the most urgent issues of our times and together with customers, we are co-creating pioneering digital solutions to enable the carbon-neutral future.” He added, “In collaboration with Hitachi Vantara, we are delighted to launch the Lumada Inspection Insights portfolio, which gives industrial organizations the tools they need to get the right information to the right teams when they need it most. The result is improved reliability, safety, and sustainability.”

Frank Antonysamy, Chief Digital Solutions Officer, Hitachi Vantara, said, “Becoming data driven is essential to accelerating digitalization and sustainability. This collaboration across Hitachi creates better outcomes for businesses, broader society and our environment by harnessing data and AI to solve multiple operational and business challenges. Together, we can improve industrial asset reliability, prevent wildfires and accelerate global sustainability efforts.”

Lumada Inspection Insights features comprehensive, microservices-based capabilities that allow visibility of assets and factors such as current state, asset health, and encroachment, in a “single pane of glass” actionable view, from a variety of sources. With these unified insights, organizations can improve safety, reliability, and agility. The use of high-resolution, autonomous, and accurate wide-area surveillance ensures that truck rolls and workforce deployments are optimized, reducing waste and furthering a sustainable approach to operations and maintenance.

Utilities around the world are dealing with unprecedented climate-related challenges. In 2021, global wildfires generated an estimated total of 6,450 megatons of CO₂ equivalent – approximately 148 percent more than the EU’s total fossil fuel emissions in 2020.^*(1) These wildfires and other extreme weather events also take a significant toll on transmission lines and other utility assets, threatening worker safety and grid reliability.

*(1) Source: https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/wildfires-wreaked-havoc-2021-cams-tracked-their-impact

“Inspection, planning and monitoring are among the most critical tasks utilities undertake to maintain grid reliability and resiliency,” said John Villali, Research Director, IDC Energy Insights. He added, “Lumada Inspection Insights combines a variety of visual asset data types with advanced analytics and AI. This empowers utilities to improve decision making, optimize operations and as a result, achieve their reliability, safety, and sustainability goals.”

Hitachi is exhibiting Lumada Inspection Insights at DISTRIBUTECH INTERNATIONAL 2022, which is held from May 23 at Dallas, Texas, United States.

Editor’s Notes

About the four main solutions comprising Lumada Inspection Insights

1. Hitachi Image Based Inspections (HIBI):

Conventional asset inspection methods, such as climbing tall towers or hanging from helicopters, put technicians at risk. Hitachi Image Based Inspections replaces these dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming approaches by leveraging the industry’s most sophisticated AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities in one fully automated and integrated platform. This solution provides scalable image inferencing and processing to help asset managers classify assets, detect defects and categorize defect severity. It automates defect assessment, instantly preprocessing and analyzing thousands of images. The solution’s highly optimized human-in-the-loop capabilities enable continuous retraining of model-based subject matter expert input for a wide range of asset classes and image quality.

2. Hitachi Intelligent Infrastructure Monitoring:

Utilities and other asset intensive organizations are challenged with the need to ensure that their service territories are safe and the service they provide is reliable. To meet this goal, utilities need to have insights to prevent safety incidents, or respond effectively when they happen. Hitachi Intelligent Infrastructure Monitoring leverages video, a powerful data type that is generally utilized to a fraction of its potential. With it, organizations can gather new data though smart cameras, 3D LiDAR sensors and edge gateways, and integrate with CRM, ERP, and other sources of data as required. Operators can gain granular, continuous 3D intelligence for sensitive areas (such as substations), find correlations, causations and real-time incidents.

3. Hitachi Vegetation Manager:

Hitachi Vegetation Manager is the first of its kind, closed-loop vegetation resource planning solution that leverages artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of an organization’s vegetation job activities and planning efforts.

The solution utilizes images from a variety of visual sources, including photo, video, and imagery from industry-leading Maxar satellites. The incorporation of satellite technology allows utilities to cover and survey their entire territory to automatically confirm line clearances and maintain compliance with regulations. Satellite technology also provides organizations with more comprehensive insights at scale, allowing them to reduce cost and emissions by minimizing truck and helicopter trips. By combining the images with climate, ecosystem and cut plan data and machine learning algorithms, Hitachi Vegetation Manager enables instant grid-wide visibility and better insights so that organizations can optimize decision-making.

4. Hitachi Map:

Hitachi Map is designed to be the primary interaction point for users, from field technicians looking for work orders in a specific area to a control center team managing a city-wide outage. It’s a “single pane of glass” from which users can access essential information, make informed decisions, and take immediate action.​ Hitachi Map combines information from numerous applications such as EAM, APM, FSM, ADMS, GIS, and more into a single, interactive and easy-to-use geospatial view. Users have intuitive access to key information at their fingertips without having to navigate multiple systems, interpret contextual variations. This approach eliminates extra and duplicative work and reduces carbon emissions from unnecessary travel to and from a site.

Attachment

• Combining the power of the camera with data and AI

Rebecca Bleasdale
Hitachi Energy Ltd.
+41 78643 2613
rebecca.bleasdale@hitachienergy.com

Investigators Report Positive Findings From Feasibility Study of CCM in Heart Failure With Preserved Ejection Fraction at the European Society of Cardiology Heart Failure 2022 Congress

MADRID and MARLTON, N.J., May 23, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Impulse Dynamics, a global medical device company dedicated to improving the lives of people with heart failure (HF), announced today a late-breaking presentation of results from the CCM-HFpEF Piloty Study, which is the largest clinical trial to date studying the effects of the company’s proprietary CCM® therapy to treat HF with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). The results presented — including a substantial 18 point improvement in the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) quality of life score — indicate that, for patients with heart failure and left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) ≥50%, CCM therapy not only offered meaningful improvement in quality of life but also substantially decreased hospitalizations versus the patient’s experience prior to the Optimizer® implant. The results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology’s Heart Failure 2022 Congress.

Patients with HFpEF suffer from debilitating symptoms and have very few therapeutic options. This patient population is a similar size as the one with reduced ejection fraction and has been shown to have similar struggles with quality of life, hospitalizations, and mortality.

Cecilia Linde, MD, Professor and Consultant in Cardiology at the Heart and Vascular Theme of Karolinska University Hospital and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who was the co-principal investigator for this investigation, said, “The CCM-HFpEF Pilot Study was conducted to explore the hypothesis that CCM therapy might benefit patients with HFpEF. Our hypothesis was based on evidence of greater benefits in CCM HFrEF studies in those with higher LVEF range and from case reports of HFpEF patients. In our CCM-HFpEF-Pilot Study, we found significant benefits from CCM therapy in patients with preserved LVEF, supporting prior findings. I look forward to following the progress of the recently begun pivotal AIM HIGHer trial to continue this journey further.”

Dr. Ishu Rao, Medical Director for Impulse Dynamics, welcomed these results because they confirm the potential for positive results in the company’s recently initiated AIM HIGHer trial. “We are also excited to announce that enrollment is well underway for this landmark IDE-approved, multicenter, randomized, and blinded pivotal trial designed not only to confirm Dr. Linde’s groundbreaking work presented today but to go further yet by providing the first long term morbidity and mortality results for a modern Optimizer CCM device. While Dr. Linde specifically studied patients with EFs ≥50%, in AIM HIGHer, we are examining the efficacy of CCM therapy in 1,500 patients with EFs between 40% and 60%. This represents a large cohort of patients who currently have minimal treatment options and are clamoring for help. If AIM HIGHer’s results are consistent with Dr. Linde’s findings, we may finally begin to close the significant gap in care that exists for millions of patients afflicted with HF and higher EF.”

HF affects more than 64 million people worldwide and leads to dramatic declines in a patient’s quality of life. Patients are often classified by a measure of cardiac function known as the ejection fraction (EF), which describes the percentage of blood pumped out of the left ventricle with each heartbeat. CCM therapy is currently indicated in Europe for patients that have an EF below 50% and has been proven to reduce hospitalizations. However, HF patients with higher EF have had few therapeutic options thus far to alleviate their symptoms and treat their disease.

The purpose of the AIM HIGHer trial — the largest randomized, sham-controlled, device-based interventional heart failure trial — is to further assess the potential of CCM to improve performance and reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality for these patients. CCM therapy for HFpEF has already received the FDA’s breakthrough device designation. The Breakthrough Devices Program is a voluntary program for certain medical devices that provide more effective treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating diseases or conditions. The goal of the Breakthrough Devices Program is to provide patients and health care providers with timely access to these medical devices by speeding up their development, assessment, and review while preserving the statutory standards consistent with the Agency’s mission to protect and promote public health.

The Optimizer Smart Mini delivers CCM therapy which consists of precisely timed electrical pulses sent to the heart. These signals are designed to improve the heart’s ability to function properly, allowing more oxygen-rich blood to be pushed out through the body.

About Impulse Dynamics

Impulse Dynamics, based in Marlton, NJ, is dedicated to helping healthcare providers enhance the lives of people with heart failure by transforming how the condition is treated. The company has pioneered CCM® therapy, which is delivered by the company’s Optimizer® Smart Mini, an FDA-approved treatment verified to improve the quality of life for certain heart failure patients. CCM therapy is a safe, effective, and minimally invasive treatment option for many heart failure patients who otherwise have few effective options available to them. To learn more, visit www.ImpulseDynamics.com, or follow the company on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Forward-looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as ‘‘may,’’ ‘‘will,’’ ‘‘should,’’ ‘‘expect,’’ ‘‘plan,’’ ‘‘anticipate,’’ ‘‘could,’’ ‘‘intend,’’ ‘‘target,’’ ‘‘project,’’ ‘‘contemplate,’’ ‘‘believe,’’ ‘‘estimate,’’ ‘‘predict,’’ ‘‘potential’’ or ‘‘continue’’ or the negative of these terms or other similar expressions, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning: potential benefits of CCM therapy and the ability for CCM therapy and our products to fill a significant unmet medical need for patients with heart failure; and the short-term and long-term benefits of the Optimizer Smart Mini and CCM therapy in patients with heart failure, as well as to the physicians treating those patients. These forward-looking statements are based on management’s current expectations and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Other important factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those contemplated in this press release include, without limitation: the Company’s future research and development costs, capital requirements and the Company’s needs for additional financing; commercial success and market acceptance of CCM therapy; the Company’s ability to achieve and maintain adequate levels of coverage or reimbursement for Optimizer Smart and Optimizer Smart Mini systems or any future products the Company may seek to commercialize; competitive companies and technologies in the industry; the Company’s ability to expand its indications and develop and commercialize additional products and enhancements to its current products; the Company’s business model and strategic plans for its products, technologies and business, including its implementation thereof; the Company’s ability to expand, manage and maintain its direct sales and marketing organization; the Company’s ability to commercialize or obtain regulatory approvals for CCM therapy and its products, or the effect of delays in commercializing or obtaining regulatory approvals; FDA or other U.S. or foreign regulatory actions affecting us or the healthcare industry generally, including healthcare reform measures in the United States and international markets; the timing or likelihood of regulatory filings and approvals; and the Company’s ability to establish and maintain intellectual property protection for CCM therapy and products or avoid claims of infringement. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements and expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

Rex Richmond, Director (Media Relations)
Impulse Dynamics
856-642-9933
rrichmond@impulsedynamics.com

Harriss Currie, CFO (Investor Relations)
Impulse Dynamics
856-642-9933
hcurrie@impulsedynamics.com

Ian Segal, Manager (Public Relations)
Impulse Dynamics
856-642-9933
isegal@impulsedynamics.com