Technology offers smart approach to cardiac monitoring

Smartphone technology, created at the University of Turku and developed by the company CardioSignal, has been used to analyse heart movement and detect heart failure. Involving five organisations from Finland and the United States, the technology has been built on the use of gyrocardiography, a non-invasive technique for measuring cardiac vibrations on the chest. The smartphone's built-in motion sensors can detect and record these vibrations, including those that doctors cannot hear with a stethoscope. The method has been developed over the last 10 years by researchers at the University of Turku and CardioSignal.

Approximately 1,000 people, including around 200 who were patients suffering from heart failure, took part in the collaborator’s latest study, which was carried out at the Turku and Helsinki University Hospitals in Finland and Stanford University Hospital in the US.

“The results we obtained with this new method are promising and may in the future make it easier to detect heart failure,” said Cardiologist Antti Saraste, one of the two main authors of the research article and the Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Turku, Finland. 

The researchers found that heart failure is associated with typical changes in the motion sensor data collected by a smartphone. On the basis of this data, the researchers were able to identify the majority of patients with heart failure.

"Primary healthcare has very limited tools for detecting heart failure. We can create completely new treatment options for remote monitoring of at-risk groups and for monitoring already diagnosed patients after hospitalisation," added CardioSignal's founding member and CEO, Cardiologist Juuso Blomster.

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