‘Heartphone’ tracker could revolutionise disease prevention
14 Apr 2024
The popularity of the smartphone could provide significant advances in the rate of detection of heart failure, suggests collaborative work between Finland’s University of Turku and healthcare tech firm CardioSignal.
Their project’s novel tracking method harnesses the device's motion sensors to analyse heart movement, potentially revolutionising the diagnosis of heart failure, a condition that affects tens of millions worldwide, posing serious health risks and often requires repeat hospitalisations.
Characterised by the heart's inability to effectively pump blood to the body and stemming from various cardiovascular diseases, heart failure is often difficult to diagnose.
Traditional diagnostic methods include clinical examinations, blood tests and imaging but the new technique, known as gyrocardiography, offers a non-invasive approach to detecting heart failure by measuring cardiac vibrations on the chest.
And using a smartphone's built-in motion sensors can enable the capture of subtle vibrations that may escape early detection even with a stethoscope, said the researchers. Integration of smartphone-based diagnostics could help develop more efficient and accessible healthcare solutions.
“The results we obtained with this new method are promising and may in the future make it easier to detect heart failure,” stated cardiologist Antti Saraste, one of the two main authors of the research article and the Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Turku, Finland.
The work is the culmination of a decade of research collaboration between the two collaborating organisations.
In a recent study they conducted at leading medical institutions in Finland and the United States, including Turku and Helsinki University Hospitals and Stanford University Hospital, approximately 1,000 individuals participated, including 200 patients diagnosed with heart failure.
By comparing the motion sensor data of heart failure patients with those without the condition, researchers were able to identify distinctive patterns associated with heart failure, demonstrating the potential efficacy of smartphone-based detection methods.
“Primary healthcare has very limited tools for detecting heart failure. We can create completely new treatment options for remote monitoring of at-risk groups and for monitoring already diagnosed patients after hospitalisation," said CardioSignal founding member and CEO, cardiologist Juuso Blomster.
NEWS: Remote monitoring patients who have recently had a heart attack reduces A&E attendance and readmissions to hospital, and could ease NHS demand, according to British Heart Foundation (BHF) research.
The study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) describes the success of ‘telemedicine’ where patients send their vital signs to specialist cardiology teams for a remote consultation when they experience worrying symptoms. Research revealed they were 76 per cent less likely to be readmitted to hospital within six months and 41 per cent less likely to attend A&E compared to those who received the usual care. They also had a 15 per cent lower risk of repeat heart attacks after nine months, fewer unplanned surgical procedures on the blood vessels of the heart and lower rate of strokes.
Some 100,000 UK hospital admissions a year are due to a heart attack with c15 per cent in England are readmitted as emergencies within 30 days.
