Videos and Masterclasses

At the AF-B-STEP Kick-Off Meeting in Amsterdam, Prof. Daniel Steven interviewed John Clifford (IHI) about the project’s role in advancing atrial fibrillation research through a unique public-private collaboration. Over the next four years, the consortium aims to improve AF detection, quantification, and understanding to support better diagnosis and patient outcomes.

We sat down with Project Coordinator Prof. Paulus Kirchhof to talk about the vision behind AF-B-STEP. In this interview, he explains why the binary “yes or no” diagnosis of atrial fibrillation is no longer sufficient in the digital age – and how AF-B-STEP aims to establish AF burden as a clinically meaningful, measurable endpoint for treatment decisions, regulatory approvals, and future clinical guidelines.

In this interview, recorded at the AF-B-STEP Consortium Kick-off Meeting in Amsterdam, we speak with Mirko de Melis – Distinguished Clinical Advisor at Medtronic and Project Leader of AF-B-STEP. Mirko discusses what makes this consortium unique, the industry perspective on AF burden research, key challenges ahead, and his vision for the future of AF monitoring.

In this exclusive interview, Prof. Daniel Steven speaks with Prof. John Camm – one of the world’s leading experts in atrial fibrillation and Chair of the AF-B-STEP Ethics Advisory Board (EAB). The EAB is an independent advisory body of external experts, established at the very start of the AF-B-STEP project, consisting of John Camm, Jonathan Piccini and Stephen Gilbert.

At the kickoff meeting of the AF-B-STEP Consortium in Amsterdam, Prof. Paulus Kirchhof spoke with Prof. Daniel Steven, AFNET Steering Committee member, who shared valuable insights into the goals of Work Package 1 (WP1): Driving high-impact, evidence-based communication and dissemination activities to ensure targeted outreach across relevant stakeholder communities and towards the general public.

At the AF-B-STEP Kick-Off in Amsterdam, Prof. Daniel Steven (AFNET) spoke with Dr. Julius Obergassel (UKE). As Work Package 2 (WP2) Lead, Dr. Obergassel and Co-Lead Techniker Krankenkasse are centralising data from multiple prospective studies, including a fully remote one, to create the consortium’s largest integrated dataset for analyzing AF burden against clinical and patient-reported outcomes.

In this Interview, recorded at the AF-B-STEP Kick-Off Meeting in Amsterdam, Work Package 3 (WP3) Lead, Prof. Ulrich Schotten from Maastricht University (UM), speaks with Prof. Daniel Steven about one of the central challenges in AF research: accurately characterising AF burden across diverse patient populations and monitoring technologies.

First insights into Work Package 4 (WP4): Prof. Antonia Zapf, Dr. Fabian Heinrich, and Dr. Susanne Sehner discuss the statistical challenges of moving beyond a binary atrial fibrillation (AF) diagnosis to better understand how AF burden influences stroke, heart failure, cardiovascular death, and other major adverse cardiovascular events, while laying the foundation for future risk assessment and cost-effectiveness analyses.

First insights into Work Package 5 (WP5): Discover how AF burden influences a broad range of patient outcomes. In this interview, Prof. Daniel Steven (AFNET) speaks with Prof. Renate Schnabel (UKE) about WP5’s objectives, exploring the links between atrial fibrillation burden and outcomes including cognitive decline, heart failure, cardiovascular mortality, and quality of life.

In this video, Prof. Daniel Steven speaks with PD Dr. Nina Becher about Work Package 6 (WP6) and the need for standardized atrial fibrillation (AF) burden reporting. They discuss how differences in device algorithms and definitions currently limit comparability, and how WP6 is working with clinicians, industry partners and experts to establish common standards for AF burden detected by cardiac implantable electronic devices.

How can we make atrial fibrillation (AF) burden data more consistent and meaningful across different monitoring technologies? In this new AF-B-STEP video, Prof. Daniel Steven speaks with Dr. William McIntyre, WP7 Lead from McMaster University (Canada), about the work to develop standards for interpreting and reporting AF burden – from clinical devices such as Holter monitors to consumer wearables like smartwatches, rings and wristbands.