The Luma West Cardiac Detector - A First of Class Device to Diagnose/Exclude Cardiac Arrest with 95% Accuracy & within 5 Seconds, Saving up to 14,700 UK Lives Annually and 1.75m Worldwide.

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Luma West (Luma) is an innovative UK medtech company started by two brothers with medical and engineering expertise. Luma is solving an unaddressed global public health need that could save 1.75m million lives annually (Brouwer, 2015; see appendix 4): a method of rapidly and reliably diagnosing/excluding cardiac arrest.Cardiac arrest is a medical event in which a person's heart stops beating. There are 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests annually in the UK; only 8% are survived.Chest compressions -- where someone pushes up and down on the chest to pump blood around the body -- are the most important component of advanced life support.Although chest compressions can be life-saving, if the heart suddenly restarts, they break ribs and can cause outflow obstruction. Additionally, inaccurate diagnoses cause delays in appropriate treatment. Accurate, real-time and rapid diagnosis of cardiac arrest is critical according to the 2022 UK Resus Council guidelines.Unfortunately, the only recommended method of diagnosing cardiac arrest is by feeling for a central pulse during short assessments every two minutes (Resus Council, 2022). This is true even in the most state-of-the-art intensive care unit. Peripheral pulses and probes cannot be used as circulation to these areas shut down immediately before/after an arrest. Defibrillators/ECGs also cannot be used as they only measure heart rhythm, not output/function, and heart traces are normal in PEA - the most common out-of-hospital-arrestManual pulse check is incredibly unreliable (Eberle, 1996; Tibballs, 2019). When a pulse is present, 45% of the time it is missed: rib-breaking compressions are continued unnecessarily.When a pulse is absent, 10% of the time one is felt: compressions could be stopped despite being the only thing keeping the patient alive. Pulse check, even by doctors, takes 20--30 seconds (Brouwer, 2015), and survival decreases by 17% for every five-second interruption to compressions.Luma proposes a step-change in the diagnosis of cardiac arrest. This investment will be used to complete proof-of-concept work and prototyping, conduct a clinical trial and commence regulatory approval of a non-invasive diagnostic device suitable for use by non-medics that can, with 95% accuracy, diagnose/exclude cardiac arrest within five seconds. Luma's proposed package of device and training, if widely and publicly disseminated, could save 14,700 lives annually in the UK and 1.75m lives globally, increasing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival from 8% to 28% - physiologically possible as Norway has 25% survival of out-of-hospital-arrest.