Design Challenge and Design Ideas

“A healthy heart

An arrhythmia is an abnormal heartbeat that can be harmless or life-threatening. The most common type is atrial fibrillation (AFib), where the upper heart chambers contract irregularly. This can lead to blood clots, stroke, heart failure, and other heart-related complications. It’s estimated that annually as many as 12.1 million people in the US will have AFib (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) by 2030.

There are limited options available to doctors assessing patients with irregular heart conditions. The most common is a Holter monitor, but these are restrictive to wear, and typically only offer a 24-hour recording window to capture any potential irregularity. Longer-term solutions like implantable loop recorders are intrusive and require the patient to be placed under anesthetic to get them inserted. While there has been a recent surge in consumer devices that record ECG signals, they only provide limited recording fidelity, and intermittent monitoring.”

How the brief was fulfilled

“We should be empowered to monitor our wellbeing everyday, with consumer-friendly, preventative solutions. How might we create an accurate, unintrusive, and non-invasive solution that could monitor you for weeks or even months?

Our solution is Viscero – a truly wearable ECG monitoring device. Its sensor technology is integrated seamlessly into a simple vest. A traditional Holter is uncomfortable and inhibits natural movement, often making the data it collects unrepresentative and unhelpful, so we’ve designed and engineered a wearable that is the same as throwing on a vest underneath your everyday clothes. Now you can run for the bus, walk your dog, hug your children and unwind on the sofa, without giving Viscero a second thought. It’s a medical-grade, 6-lead ECG monitoring system you can forget about.

One of the major innovations of Viscero is the use of dry electrodes that are positioned away from the chest to more peripheral locations, while maintaining consistent compression points. This enabled us to overcome the barrier of specificity. Viscero has compression on the arms and waist that is carefully integrated using lamination and double layer compression areas. Most importantly, the brain of Viscero is the size of a matchbox and fits easily into a small pocket on the t-shirt; You can take it out to recharge or put the t-shirt in the washing machine without hassle. The device links to a healthcare professional’s dashboard that uses AI to segment recordings into pre-arrhythmia and post-arrhythmia. The data can then be triaged for cardiologists to review, saving hours of scrolling through ECG recordings. The patient app is designed to provide peace of mind through effortless interaction and direct connection with their healthcare consultant – empowering the ‘therapeutic alliance’.

Viscero allows its wearer to have the freedom of their everyday life, whilst simultaneously capturing and communicating vital data. The system of wearable vest combined with a shared doctor-patient dashboard could revolutionize ECG monitoring. Leading cardiologists have described the signal quality of Viscero’s ECG waveforms as “diagnostic quality data” and Viscero has the potential to drive a more connected and positive healthcare experience for both doctors and patients alike.”