With a new high-tech, wearable heart monitor, Dr. Rameen Shakur is hoping that AI will help blast cardiology into the future.
In the first quarter of 2019, Shakur will introduce the Heartsense monitor — billed as the first AI-driven wearable heart monitor — to the market.
The monitor is being released by Cambridge Heartwear, the Cambridge, United Kingdom–based company that Shakur co-founded in 2017.
For Shakur, this device occupies an important niche that he noticed other monitors weren’t necessarily filling.
“You’d see people walk around with these monitors that never understood the patient experience — these Holter devices that feel like having an octopus stuck to your old ’80s Walkman that’s strapped to your side,” Shakur, currently a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Healthline. “It got me thinking, ‘This is exactly why the majority of our patients don’t keep monitors on long enough. They’re not ergonomic, they’re not comfortable, they don’t fit in with daily life.'”
He added, “In the U.K., unfortunately, one has to go through their primary care who refers you to get a device. It’s like a four-to-six-week wait before you get a monitor.
In that time, it’s like a ticking time bomb; you could get a stroke in that time period. I kept thinking, ‘How can we really get people diagnoses in real time if they have to go through this process to get these monitors?'”
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