Care your Heart

Care your heart is developing a low-cost monitoring ECG and a platform that can be used in underdeveloped countries where access to health is extremely unequal and limited.

Care your heart develops a low-cost medical device that can monitor the ECG and upload it to a platform. The solution is constituted by the following technology:

- ECG low-cost detecting device: formed by reusable dry electrodes that eliminate the need to buy them each time the ECG is taken, ECG sensor, battery, etc.

-Analytic platform where the doctor can watch the ECG with parameters such as the heart rate, PQRST waves maximum amplitude, and duration. The platform will also give a diagnosis to support the ECG doctor interpretation, thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence, and will save the patient's ECG into a database to create a register of the patient.

Both of them will be connected by Bluetooth allowing by this way and offline connection.

Cardiovascular diseases are the first cause of death in the world. Developed countries have designed over the years specific medical devices and treatments to prevent and control them. 

However, in underdeveloped countries such as India, where access to health is really limited, Cardiovascular diseases cause the death of approximately 3 million people per year being the 40 % of all of them under the age of 55 years old. This is a real pandemia that is killing millions of people every year, and one of the main causes is unequal access to health. 

In addition, India has a population of 1.38 billion people, and around 65 % of them live in rural areas where the health system has several problems of lack of doctors, infrastructural problems, lack of beds in hospitals, etc.  

Taking into consideration these problems, the prevention of cardiovascular diseases in rural areas has the potential to avoid millions of deaths.

Our idea is focused to improve the lives of those people who live in rural areas of India and have several difficulties having access to a health system of quality. Rural India has a population of 897 million people, hence, our solution has the purposed of being scalable, starting helping in little towns of the state of Rajasthan. 

In this state, the health problem is specifically relevant, due to its large dimension, covering  342.239 square kilometers, which represent 10% of India´s total geographical area.

Consequently, access to hospitals is extremely difficult, and people have to travel enormous distances to go to the nearest hospital. To solve these problems, our idea provides a low-cost ECG monitorization device and a visualization platform that can be used in local health centers. Thanks to it, we will be able to solve 2 main problems:

- Lack of prevention and monitoring of cardiovascular diseases in rural India because of the absence of equipment.

- Absence of specialists who works in rural areas and can detect abnormalities in the ECG and provide recommendations based on it. 

For the last year Care your Heart has done exhaustive researches to understand the need of potential users of our product, and in which ways they were underserved by the local health system. Our research has been mainly theoretical, reading papers, news, looking for statistics, and understanding in which way our technology can be adapted in the best way to help the largest number of people. 

In addition, we have talked to different doctors of our city, Madrid, and we have explained our purpose to them. They have done specific suggestions which are being considered to develop the prototype. 

The idea is yet a concept, no prototype has been developed yet. Nowadays, we are defining the concept requirements to adapt our product to social needs.

Our team is yet talking with doctors, looking for statistics, and defining the road we want to follow to achieve our purpose. As we have just finished our Master's, we are also trying to find ways of funding to start our journey properly. What we can ensure is that although our journey has just started, we are full of energy and excited about which next steps we will accomplish.

Basically, Care your Heart has two components: 

- Low-cost ECG detecting device: formed by reusable dry electrodes, ECG sensor, battery, etc.

-Analytic platform where the doctor can watch the ECG with parameters such as the heart rate, PQRST waves maximum amplitude, and duration. The platform will also give a diagnosis to support the ECG doctor interpretation, thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence, and will save the patient's ECG into a database to create a register of the patient.

Both of them will be connected by Bluetooth allowing by this way and offline connection.

We have not launched our product yet, but we have estimated that our product has the potential of helping 897 million people when it is fully developed.

We want to start our journey helping in small towns of the state of Rajasthan, which has a population of 68 million people. By the first year, our objective is mainly to cover the health of little villages of no more than 10000 population. With this, we will know if our product is working properly and which things we must improve. Later on, we will try to target more towns, so we will be able to improve the health of more people.

1. Building the prototype and the data visualization platform. This objective requires external funding to be accomplished.

2. Showing our product to potential users who can benefit from it. When the prototype is developed, we will contact different organizations to help us to make our product known in the area we will start operating.

3. Construct a database and train our Artificial Intelligent algorithm. With the data collected by the first users and external databases, we will develop an AI algorithm able to make suggestions.

4. Adapt our prototype to specific changes and suggestions that users require.

The problem we are trying to solve is englobed in the target objective of achieving universal health coverage, and access to quality essential healthcare services. 

The main indicators we will use are: 

-People who have access to an ECG monitoring system since our solution is launched/People who have access before our solution is launched.

-% of cardiovascular diseases prevented.

-Years of life saved thanks to our solution.

The main barriers are:

- Financial: we do need funding to build our prototype and the data visualization platform to start operating.

-Technical: we need to create a database to train our AI system.

-Partnership: we want to make our idea known and get support from organizations.

We are a team full of energy and with different backgrounds. The team is formed by three engineers, one informatician, one lawyer, one nutritionist, and one marketing student. 

As the team lead, my background has provided me with different experiences that have meaningful guided me to try to design something to improve the health of people. As a Biomedical Engineer, I have always tried to connect engineering to health, and I cannot find anything more excited than designing something that has the impact of improving the health of millions of people. 

We are really well-positioned because we have a mix of 3 things: ambition, youngth, and desire to help and change the world. 

We are not working with any organizations yet, we are currently taking with external people and doctors to build a product that covers the social need that we want to achieve.

Care your Heart is truly qualified for this prize. We really believe that our idea has the potential to help millions of people when it is fully developed. Due to the technical skills of our team, we have the knowledge to convert our concept into a real product, so nowadays our main barrier to getting it is the financial barrier.

The prize will be used for 3 different things;

- Creation of the platform and the AI algorithm.

- Creation of a low-cost ECG monitoring device.

- Travels to the local district where we will start operating to make our product known and hear the changes and recommendations that locals can give to us to finally get a product able to cover the health needs.