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

《心动》背后的催化剂是2015年与一名心脏移植外科医生的一次对话，那次对话引发了一个简单的问题：你知道吗，我做手术的人中，有一半人如果及时报告了自己的症状，就根本不需要做手术。进一步的研究让发自内心的创始人们发现了那些不遵守规则的患者的隐藏问题。这些人大多是老年人，通常是独居，许多人的智力正在恶化，他们无法听从医生给他们的建议。当他们的症状恶化时，他们没有呼救，而是紧急入院。全球有6000多万人患有心力衰竭--这是一种晚期疾病，其生存统计比大多数癌症都要差。治疗他们的成本是巨大的，仅在英国每年大约就有17亿GB，其中大部分花在提供昂贵且往往可以预防的医院治疗上。哈特费尔特的愿景是通过放置在患者家中的自主监测设备来解决这个问题，这些设备测量心脏、肺和体液参数以识别早期的心脏问题。VitalHeart设备可以用来优化患者服用的药物剂量，以保持他们的稳定性，并在健康恶化的情况下触发警报，从而及时进行医疗干预。它有可能提高数百万心脏病患者的生活质量，还可以通过腾出医院床位来节省NHS的资金和减少急诊室的等待时间。VitalHeart设备是全自动的，不需要与患者交互。这些数据被上传到云中，并使用人工智能进行分析，人工智能会监测关键变化。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--心型设备的有效性，大量学术文献证实了我们计划作为附加设备实施的额外测量技术(VitalHeart)的实用性。该项目的主要目标是建立新的测量技术的原型，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，以便在开始商业化之前验证这些新的额外数据，以用于发自内心的患者风险评分机器学习模型和监管批准。

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.