Curing Heart Disease with Big Data: A Handheld Device to Save Your Life

A conversation with Nassir Marrouche, Executive Director, CARMA, University of Utah; A conversation with Karim Marrouche, Co-Founder and President, Cardiac Designs

Nassir has been researching arrhythmias and heart disease for 24 years. 15-20% of people have heart problems and don’t know about it and runners and those in very good physical condition can actually be at higher risk of arrhythmias. The current protocol is reactionary to problems that have already manifested, but imagine if we could detect this ahead of time.

Ideally, we should have regular EKGs and be tracking changes in our heart rates.

Larry Smarr’s EKG being measured live on-stage using Cardiac Designs daily monitor.

Karim, Nassir’s brother, has developed a $99 iPhone case with two thumb-sized sensors that wirelessly transmits EKGs to an iPhone. The report can be sent to your doctor. The idea is to monitor your heart on a daily basis. In 5-10 years time, this will be standard.

Commercially available starting Monday at ECGCheck.com.

This allows doctors to treat patients in real-time with blood thinners and ID unnecessary trips to the emergency room. Working on software to compare your data.

The pair are also starting a portal with Collaborate.org, Heart-o-gram.collaborate.org, to assemble a set of heart rate data that will allow them to ID patterns in patients with heart arrhythmias.