Making digital health work for excluded populations: a companion app for an AI medical device specifically designed for the most vulnerable heart failure patients

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The catalyst behind the Heartfelt device 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 to identify early heart problems. The Heartfelt device is fully automatic and requires no interaction with the patient. The data is uploaded to the cloud and analysed using artificial intelligence, which monitors for critical changes. It is complicated, cutting-edge technology, but utterly simple to use.The programme associated with this award would not only help me develop my leadership skills, and support our profile for fundraising, it will also allow me to develop this app to increase the value that our medical device can already bring to patients. It promotes patient-centric care and is being designed in close consultation with cardiologists, GP, Nurses, patients and their families. 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.I am also very interested in the volunteering opportunities that come with the project. These will likely increase my involvement in mentoring and encouraging young women and girls to break barriers. Healthcare needs more innovative solutions, and getting more women to consider biotech as a career option will help speed up innovation.