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Startup founded by top Israeli cardiologist detects heart disease via smartphone

Cordio Medical’s HearO app detects subtle changes in voice tone to diagnose congestive heart failure before the onset of symptoms.

The sound of your voice could save your life. That’s the science behind HearO, a smartphone app that can detect subtle changes in voice tone to diagnose congestive heart failure, a disease that kills millions of people every year.

By the time patients suffering from congestive heart failure begin to feel symptoms and visit the doctor, it is often too late to treat them effectively. More than half die within five years of diagnosis.

The app is the brainchild of Cordio Medical, an Israel startup founded by Prof. Chaim Lotan, director of the Heart Institute at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem. The FDA has granted breakthrough device designation to HearO, which uses artificial intelligence and speech signal processing algorithms to detect subtle voice changes that begin at the earliest stages of congestive heart failure, before other symptoms appear.

The idea for HearO began when Prof Lotan noted that most patients who came to the hospital with congestive heart failure had high-pitched voices, caused by the fluid in their lungs.

For years, the main method of monitoring patients with congestive heart failure has been relying on changes in body weight, which may indicate the buildup of fluid in the body, but this has often proved inaccurate, Lotan says.

The HearO system – a speech-processing app with a cloud-based server – captures and creates a baseline of a patient’s speech and voice, then monitors them speaking daily to detect changes that could signal an otherwise undetected buildup of fluid in the lungs. To train the app, patients simply speak a few sentences into HearO, just as they would with Siri or Alexa. Each day, the app prompts them to recite a couple of sentences and detects any changes.

For now, Cordio notifies a patient’s doctor when there is a deviation. In the future, Tamir Tal, Cordio’s CEO hopes it will simply instruct a patient to adjust their treatment, similar to how a glucometer lets diabetics monitor blood sugar levels and adjust insulin accordingly.

“It will allow chronic patients to manage their own medication,” Tal says. “Eventually, the vision is that they won’t need a doctor as much. It’s a system that can completely change the way congestive heart failure is managed, saving billions of dollars as well as lives.”

Because the app is inexpensive and easy to use, it can easily be extended to poorer countries.

Source The Times of Israel