Our smartwatches have gotten pretty good at being able to detect heart problems, or at least notify the wearer that something could be wrong. This is great because these are problems that might not have been picked up until it is too late, and we have heard multiple stories of how people have had their lives saved due to early detection.
Now it looks like thanks to work done by University of Utah Health and VA Salt Lake City Health Care System scientists, they have developed an AI-powered wearable sensor that will also be able to detect heart failure in advance, which could also help prevent patients from having to visit a hospital.
According to one of the study’s authors, Josef Stehlik, “Being able to readily detect changes in the heart sufficiently early will allow physicians to initiate prompt interventions that could prevent rehospitalization and stave off worsening heart failure.” How this works is that the sensor will transmit the data from it to a smartphone via Bluetooth.
That data is then sent to an analytics platform developed by PhysIQ, who uses AI to help establish a normal baseline, and from there, if the data deviates from the norm, it could be an indication that something’s wrong and notify the user accordingly. So far based on their tests, they have found that the system is about 80% accurate when it comes to predicting the need for hospitalization. It can also detect health problems fairly early on about 10.4 days before a readmission took place.