Right time, right place, right advice: AI-enabled medication reminder for in-home heart monitor

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The catalyst behind the company's main product was a conversation with a heart transplant surgeon in 2015 that prompted a simple question: 'Do you know, that half the people I operate on wouldn't require surgery at all if they had reported their symptoms in time?'.Further research enabled the Heartfelt founders to unearth the hidden problem of "non-adherent' patients. These are mostly elderly people, often living alone, many with deteriorating mental capacity, who are unable to follow the advice given to them by their doctors. Instead of calling for help as their symptoms get worse, they end up as emergency hospital admissions.There are over 60M people globally with heart failure - a terminal illness with worse survival statistics than most cancers. The cost of treating them is substantial, roughly £1.7billion/year in the UK alone, most of which is spent delivering expensive and often preventable hospital treatments.Heartfelt's vision is to address this problem with an autonomous-monitoring-device that sits in the patient's home, measuring changes in foot-volume -- a key indicator of heart problems -- and triggering alerts and thus timely medical intervention. It has the potential to improve the life quality of millions of heart patients, and also to save the NHS money and reduce waiting time in A&E by freeing up hospital-beds.Heartfelt's monitor is fully automatic and requires no interaction with the patient. The foot-volume data is uploaded to the cloud and analysed using artificial intelligence, which watches for critical changes. It is complicated, cutting-edge technology, protected by patent but utterly simple to use. Pilot trials on hundreds of patients in the UK have demonstrated its effectiveness.By engaging a wide range of our patients and their carers in product development discussions, we found that a significant number of them would be open to the idea of the device itself providing reminders if their foot volume was increasing. That is how the idea for Aiona was born.The main aim of the project is to develop this "Alexa-like" feature, Aiona, to remind patients to take their medications when their foot volume trend raises alert on the main Heartfelt device. This would trigger a notification to the patient's care team who can review the data and decide if a medication prompt can be sent.Unlike daily medication-reminders, which patients become reminder-blind to within weeks, an occasional reminder when their symptoms are worsening is likely to be more effective.