Smartphones can help doctors detect fluid accumulation via a patient’s voice
(Healthcare Brew – Shannon Young) — Monitoring patients with congestive heart failure for costly and dangerous complications, like fluid accumulation, could soon be as easy as asking Apple’s Siri for directions or ordering your outfit for the Eras tour via Amazon’s Alexa.
Israel-based health technology company Cordio Medical, along with AstraZeneca and Spain’s Bellvitge University Hospital, are piloting HearO, a smartphone application that uses artificial intelligence to detect heart failure warning signs in a patient’s speech patterns and notify their doctor weeks before a cardiac event occurs.
The pilot will examine patient compliance with HearO and the software’s notification of potential heart failure events over six to nine months.
The medical-grade software, which is undergoing FDA review, seeks to improve the quality of life for congestive heart failure patients and expand their symptom monitoring options—which can cost around $20,000 for more invasive devices, as well as have varied result accuracy and compliance among users.
Congestive heart failure patients prescribed the HearO app must repeat about five sentences into their smartphone each day. Those samples are then uploaded to a cloud-based server (currently Amazon Web Services) where they are analyzed in near-real time. Clinicians can view the results (and any alerts) via a shared web portal and determine if they need to intervene with diuretics to prevent a potential hospitalization.
Read more the new technology here.