2024-04-29 03:40:59
Heart failure may initially manifest as fatigue after exercise or shortness of breath. These symptoms can, of course, have other, less dangerous causes. Unfortunately, heart failure currently requires an ultrasound scan of the heart, blood tests, or other special procedures to check if your symptoms are caused by heart failure.
Researchers at the University of Turku in Finland have set out to develop a much simpler diagnostic method that can be quickly performed in a doctor’s office without any special equipment. The result is a machine-learning-based app that uses a smartphone‘s accelerometer and gyroscope to measure tiny vibrations in a patient’s chest.
The app was developed in cooperation with the Universities of Helsinki and Stanford. A total of 1,003 patient volunteers were screened using the app at hospitals across all three institutions, 217 of whom had already been diagnosed with heart failure, and the other 786 were healthy controls.
By analyzing the chest vibration readings captured by the app, the researchers were able to determine what characteristics were common in the heart failure study participants. After training the app based on this data, it turned out that it was 89% accurate. accurately identifies people with heart failure, a number that should increase as the software becomes more data-intensive.
“Primary care has very limited tools for detecting heart failure,” says cardiologist Juuso Blomster, CEO of CardioSignal, the company that commercializes the app. “We can create completely new treatment options to remotely monitor risk groups and monitor already diagnosed patients after hospitalization.”
The research is described in an article that was recently published in JACC: Heart Failure. There are also apps — called Cordio HearO and Cardiio Rhythm — that detect heart failure based on the sound of a user’s voice and changes in their facial color, respectively.
Let’s look at „New Atlas“.
2024-04-29 03:40:59