Tech company’s devices aim to detect heart disease early
Identifying heart problems before they are full-blown attacks in hospital is a key to saving lives – and health spending. Has an Australian developer cracked the nut?
How to detect heart issues before they land at a hospital’s emergency department is a pressing medical problem crying out to be solved, and one Australian company believes it has hit on the answer.
Perth-based Lubdub Technologies is in the midst of developing a combination of three portable heart tests that can be done where the person lives, including in the usually under-serviced remote areas of the country.
The tests, a wearable electrocardiograph patch that can give medicos the same information as a hospital grade ECG, a saliva biosensor picking up five key cardiac biomarkers that indicate early signs of heart disease, and a wearable ultrasound for real-time heart imaging, put heart care in the home rather than in the hospital, its creators say.
In doing so, they say patients can understand their heart health earlier and seek treatment before it becomes an emergency. The result is lives saved and a significant reduction in the $12bn a year spent in Australia on heart disease management.
Lubdub’s project is one of 10 innovation projects each receiving $100,000 Catalyst Partnership Grant Awards from the Heart Foundation to help tackle Australia’s leading cause of death and hospitalisation, cardiovascular disease.
Others include a project to encourage people to switch from regular salt to potassium-enriched salt, and a co-ordinated whole-of-city healthy hearts program across sport, retail, schools health and the wider community. The city of Springfield in Queensland is the trial site.
“Despite decades of progress, cardiovascular disease still kills and hospitalises people in Australia at alarming rates,” Heart Foundation chief executive David Lloyd says.
“This is our ‘sliding doors’ moment in Australia’s fight against cardiovascular disease. These 10 projects, if fully realised, would undoubtedly help people live better and longer lives while also reducing the disease burden on our healthcare system.”
Lubdub co-founder and cardiologist Girish Dwivedi says the company’s Heart First Initiative was born from what he says was a “heartbreaking pattern” in his practice.
“Young patients walk into my clinic with advanced heart disease they never saw coming, their hearts have been silently damaged for years, unnoticed,” Professor Dwivedi says.
“Why, because basic heart diagnostic tests that should have been accessible to everyone in Australia simply aren’t. And that failure is costing lives.”
Professor Dwivedi says that by the time patients present to hospital emergency departments the disease is usually advanced and has been present for some time, often for years.
“It’s still the case that the majority of heart failure patients or patients with advanced heart disease are first diagnosed in emergency departments. And the risk of death or long-term damage increases by 21 per cent if the diagnosis is delayed, a recent study found.”
Diagnosing earlier will improve outcomes and reduce expenditure, and the way to do that is through access to these three common diagnostic tests, he says.
The founders say that when the project is up and running, and there is still some work to do to fully develop and patent the wearable ultrasound, it will also help to address the geographic and socio-economic disadvantage faced by many Australians.
Even something taken for granted in the cities, like access to a blood test and pathology lab, is not available to Australians in more remote areas.
Another Lubdub co-founder, biomedical engineer Nikhilesh Bappoo, says he was drawn to the project after growing up in Mauritius and seeing how difficult it was to access appropriate healthcare.
Dr Bappoo says the devices could be offered by a GP to a patient who may have some indicators of concern around heart health, such as shortness of breath, but not feeling any acute symptoms.
The ECG monitor is far less intrusive than those used in hospital, and the saliva test can be used to test more quickly for evidence of heart disease than undertaking a blood test. Both have been developed in collaboration with RMIT in Melbourne.
“The saliva-based test is effectively a chip that connects to your phone, and with a few drops of saliva you are able to measure five key biomarkers relating to your heart health, including some of the more acute biomarkers such as cardiac troponin, which is known to increase in the event of heart muscle damage,” Dr Bappoo says.
The data will be run through analytics in the cloud and be available to the GP. The cost of the hardware is significantly cheaper than using current devices GPs often employ to monitor heart issues, such as a halter, the founders say.
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