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

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.