Heart disease is the #1 killer in the United States.
It accounts for 1 in 4 fatalities, partially due to the difficulty in detecting. The main way of detecting heart disease now is by having your cardiologists order a test using a bulky EKG machine which is time consuming and expensive.
Some ex-Googlers got together and decided to do something about this.
Introducing the AliveCor Kardia. This $99 sensor is about the width of 2 sticks of gum and can be attached to the back of your phone or simply kept in your wallet. Hold 2 fingers on the sensor for 30 seconds and you have a medical grade EKG reading. That’s cool!
But what really is the game changer is what AliveCor Kardia does with the data. In order to prevent doctors from getting bombarded with calls from patients who think they may have gotten a bad EKG reading, AliveCor developed multi-layered algorithms and neural networks to create a fingerprint for each heart.
By placing your fingers on the pad every morning for 30 seconds for about a month(like brushing your teeth), AliveCor Kardia can create a profile for your heart. So basically, your heart shows the same profile day after day, then one day the reading looks slightly different do to a change in how your heart’s electrical system is firing. AliveCor Kardia will be able to detect this change and let you know to see a cardiologist.
Right now, AliveCor has FDA clearance identify atrial fibrillation, a common early warning of stroke. “The most common arrhythmia, the one that we need to detect, doesn’t need all 12 EKG leads,” says CEO Vic Gundotra. The size of the unit can be kept small because it is looking for specific data only.
Feature Image: AliveCor.com
Geeky Daddy 