Health technology has a checkered history. About each story Apple Watch saves someone’s lifethere is theranos You’re ruining it for everyone.

Still, the field continues to make progress. We all want to be healthy and know more about our bodies. And this is a profit opportunity that technology companies cannot ignore. The problem is that, as consumers, we have a hard time separating wheat from chaff, hard science from cosmetics.

For example, consider the heart monitoring features found in popular wearables such as the Apple Watch and Fitbit Charge. While these are useful tools for general awareness of heart health, research has shown These are not accurate enough for clinical use and the data collected “must be interpreted with caution.”

This doesn’t mean that today’s wearables aren’t useful, just that they’re completely unreliable. Things may change in the future, but currently, if you want to accurately check things like your heart health, you need to go to the hospital.

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Well, that’s what I thought. A Finnish startup called CardioSignal wants to buck this trend, saying it can detect heart disease using just your phone. Intrigued, I reached out to the company’s CEO, Juuso Blomster, to learn more.

CardioSignal’s story

In our conversation, Blomster said CardioSignal’s roots are in academia, specifically at the University of Turku, a Finnish educational institution.

Blomster is a clinical cardiologist by trade and has been in practice for nearly 20 years. The seeds for CardioSignal were planted around his 2011 years in Australia. He told TNW that this was when he first started seeing wearables make waves.

This type of technology, most notably Fitbit, was steadily gaining popularity. “As a cardiologist, when I saw patients, they were interested in understanding whether they could use a sports watch to track their heart health,” says Blomster.

At the same time, his colleagues back in Finland began testing consumer wearables to see what could be achieved in a health environment. They considered the possibility of using smartwatches to track heart health, but found it difficult to obtain clinically accurate readings from smartwatches.

“Following this, we started looking at different types of sensors, but right away there were two common ones; [on a phone], you can actually read your heart by placing an accelerometer and gyroscope on your chest. ”

Motion sensors in mobile phones have rapidly evolved to become small, accurate, and sensitive enough to measure the opening and closing of heart valves. This is something that “can usually only be measured with an ultrasound of the heart.”

“I still remember the first time I compared ultrasound signals.” [to those from] It’s a motion sensor,” Blomster said. When he and his team realized that the difference between the two was within the margin of error (“really the same”), he and his team were incredibly excited.

They realized that they could use this technology and data to accomplish “amazing things.”

What exactly is CardioSignal?

Effectively, CardioSignal is an app that you load onto your phone.

Blomster explains that when you place the handset on your chest, it uses the two common sensors mentioned above to measure your heart’s movement.

After one minute, this data is sent to a secure cloud service for analysis.From there you can tell if you are suffering from Atrial fibrillation (AFib)the most common heart rhythm disorder.

But is this like the heart-monitoring technology found in many smartwatches, useful for broad understanding but clinically useless?

no. CardioSignal’s technology analyzed Published in over 20 peer-reviewed publicationshave been validated for clinical use and are classified as: CE Class IIa Medical Device.

In other words, it’s real. CardioSignal is the first technology validated to detect heart disease without the need for specialized equipment.

The market has also been paying attention. At the beginning of 2024, CardioSign raises $10 millionFundraising led by. DigiTx Partnerwith participation from sand water and Maki.vc.

Obstacles and competitors

CardioSignal has a lot of potential, but it still has a long way to go.

Currently, the app and device only detect atrial fibrillation (AFib). It’s the most common heart rhythm disorder, but it’s not the only one the company tracks.

Both Samsung and Apple’s smartwatches have the ability to detect AFib, and given that they are worn on the wrist and work in the background, most users prefer them to rest on their chest for a minute. This is much more attractive for .

When I mentioned this to Blomster, he pointed out that CardioSignal’s technology has a number of advantages over wearables.

“The main advantage is that you can measure the heart directly,” he says. Because it is literally attached to the user’s chest, it can directly read the heart rhythm.

On the other hand, most wearable devices are close to the hand and quite far away from the organ being measured. “A lot can happen in between,” Blomster said.

In addition to this, the phone can provide even more information. Generally, smartwatches use a single channel of data: optical sensor pulses. The two sensors on the phone used by CardioSignal (accelerometer and gyroscope) each provide three-dimensional information, effectively providing six data channels.

“When the heart beats, it rotates and twists,” Blomster says. This means the company’s ability to track movement across multiple vectors provides great insight into how the heart works.

Next steps for CardioSignalÂ

Blomster said there is also “ongoing clinical validation” for a variety of other diseases. The heart failure detection feature is expected to launch in Europe this year, and the company plans to add more heart failure detection features over time. Aortic valve stenosis, coronary artery diseaseand pulmonary arterial hypertension In the near future.

However, this technology has some drawbacks. CardioSignal must be used daily, and it takes him only a minute to put it on the sternum and see results, but this is not the most natural use case. This is a deliberate tradeoff that CardiSignal made to make its heart monitoring technology “as accessible as possible.”

When people are worried and need insight about their heart, or need motivation to take medication because they want some control over their current condition, CardioSignal can help. Most do not require expensive equipment that is not available even in GP offices. .

Smartphone as a modern medical device

Interestingly, CardioSignal isn’t the only company in the health tech space to take advantage of this humble smartphone.

To learn more about this trend, we spoke to Varun Mishra, our senior analyst. study of counterpoint. “Smartphones have consistently grown in importance through a wide range of use cases in personal health, wellness, and health management. [and] Health care,” he says.

Over the past few years, various apps have appeared, as well as: headspace or medisafe While growing in popularity, these devices have also become more intimately involved in how we track our bodies. They “played a vital role in providing access to doctors through video visits, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown,” but doctors’ appointments and test results confirmations can now be done over the phone. As the number of patients increases, they are shouldering a large burden on medical administration.

When it comes to personal health, Mishra says wearables are now often acting as “input devices,” with more in-depth analysis happening in the smartphone apps themselves. This trend is rippled across the industry, with other medical devices becoming increasingly smart.

“Glucose meters, scales, blood pressure monitors, pill dispensers, metabolism trackers, and even toothbrushes are all becoming connected,” he says. The smartphone then operates a central hub for analyzing them.

In short, CardioSignal is part of a broader trend in which mobile phones are becoming central to our health management.

What are the possibilities for health technology?

“From now on, everything that can be connected will be connected,” Mishra said. “More health-related devices will become smarter and rely on smartphones to interface with end users.”

This bodes well for businesses like CardioSignal, as it means people are comfortable using their phones to monitor and take note of their health.

Of course, this also comes with risks. As more and more medical data is transferred to mobile phones, the risk of that information becoming a target for hackers increases. The easier it is for us to access all our data, the easier it is for hackers.

Still, this feels like a small risk considering the huge benefits of smartphone-based health applications. Telephones are the ideal way to democratize the medical industry, giving doctors access to more information than ever before to do their jobs, and allowing us to gain more insight into our bodies. You will be able to. and it is, almost the entire earth you can benefit from.

As technology matures and more doctors become involved, the entire medical field could change for the better. And although this is a rare case, it appears that smartphones may actually have a positive impact on society.