A foot-volume-measuring device using 3D imagery and AI to automatically monitor heart failure patients, reducing hospital stays by 165,000 bed-days/year

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The catalyst behind Heartfelt 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 60 million 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 -- 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 UK-based patients have demonstrated the effectiveness of the monitors. The main aim of the project is to finalise the development of the next-generation device, readying it for manufacturing and regulatory approvals ahead of starting commercialisation.