An autonomous device using radar-based technology and AI to monitor heart failure patients, reducing hospital stays by 247,000 bed-days/year

衷心的背后的催化剂是2015年与一位心脏移植外科医生的谈话，引发了一个简单的问题：“你知道吗，如果我做过手术的病人中有一半如果及时报告他们的症状，根本不需要手术？”进一步的研究使衷心的创始人发现了“非依从”患者的隐藏问题。这些人大多是独居的老年人，许多人的心智能力正在恶化，无法听从医生给他们的建议。当他们的症状变得更糟时，他们不是寻求帮助，而是最终被紧急送往医院。全球有超过6000万人患有心力衰竭，这是一种晚期疾病，其存活率比大多数癌症都要低。治疗这些疾病的费用相当可观，仅在英国每年就大约有17亿英镑，其中大部分都花在了昂贵且通常可以预防的医院治疗上。衷心的愿景是解决这个问题的自主监测设备，坐在病人的家里，测量心脏，肺和体液参数，以识别早期心脏问题。VitalHeart设备可用于优化患者服用的药物剂量，以使其更稳定，并触发警报，从而在健康恶化时及时进行医疗干预。它有可能改善数百万心脏病患者的生活质量，也可以节省NHS的资金，并通过腾出医院病床减少在急诊室的等待时间。VitalHeart设备是全自动的，不需要与患者互动。这些数据被上传到云端，并使用人工智能进行分析，人工智能会监视关键变化。这是一项复杂的尖端技术，但使用起来非常简单。在英国对数百名患者进行的试点试验已经证明了该公司第一款产品衷心设备的有效性，并且大量的学术文献证实了我们计划作为附加设备实施的附加测量技术（VitalHeart）的有效性。该项目的主要目的是对新的测量技术进行原型设计，进行台架测试并准备监管文件，为制造和临床试验做好准备，以验证这些新的额外数据，用于衷心患者风险评分机器学习模型，并在开始商业化之前获得监管部门的批准。

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 autonomous monitoring devices that sit in the patient's home, measuring heart, lung and body fluid parameters to identify early heart problems. The VitalHeart devices can be used to optimise the dosage of medication that patients take to keep them more stable, as well as triggering alerts and thus timely medical intervention in the event of health deterioration. 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.The VitalHeart device is fully automatic and requires no interaction with the patient. The data is uploaded to the cloud and analysed using artificial intelligence, which watches for critical changes. It is complicated, cutting-edge technology, but utterly simple to use. Pilot trials on hundreds of patients in the UK have demonstrated the effectiveness of the company's first product, the Heartfelt device, and extensive academic literature confirms the usefulness of the additional measurement technologies (VitalHeart) that we plan to implement as an add-on.The main aim of the project is to prototype the new measurement technologies, conduct bench testing and prepare regulatory documentation, readying it for manufacturing and clinical trials to validate this new additional data for the Heartfelt patient risk scoring machine learning models and regulatory approvals ahead of starting commercialisation.