Monitoring patients with congestive heart failure for costly and dangerous complications, like fluid accumulation, could soon be as easy.

 

Israel-based health technology company Cordio Medical, along with AstraZeneca and Spain’s Bellvitge University Hospital, are piloting HearO, a smartphone application that uses artificial intelligence to detect heart failure warning signs in a patient’s speech patterns and notify their doctor weeks before a cardiac event occurs.

“We took this known clinical phenomenon and just turned it into something that can be measured objectively [by] looking at electrical signals created by speech, captured by microphones on off-the-shelf mobile devices,” said Cordio CEO Tamir Tal.

The pilot will examine patient compliance with HearO and the software’s notification of potential heart failure events over six to nine months.