Speaking from the heart: New smartphone app predicts cardiac failure WEEKS in advance

• Heart failure patients speak six sentences into an app on their phone every day
• The app detects if their condition is worsening based on how their voice sounds
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A new smartphone app can predict who’s at risk of being hospitalized with heart failure simply by listening to their voice.

The AI-powered app listens to subtle changes in users’ voices that may indicate increasing fluid in their lungs – a sign of a deteriorating heart.

The more obvious signs of heart failure normally only begin to show a few days before someone is hospitalized or suffers a cardiac arrest.

But in a study of hundreds of elderly people with heart failure, the HearO app was able to predict who would deteriorate and need to be admitted to hospital three weeks before it happened.

The app was correct 76 percent of the time. It has already received a Breakthrough Device Designation, meaning its approval by the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) will be expedited, is on track to receive approval by 2024.

The Ohio State University researchers who developed the app say the advanced warning gives doctors time to start preventative treatment and it could save lives.

One in four Americans will develop heart failure in their lifetime and roughly 6.7 million Americans over 20 years of age live with the condition, which is expected to rise to 8.5 million Americans by 2030. 

Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle can’t pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs for blood and oxygen.

This can result in fatigue, fluid retention, shortness of breath and sometimes excessive coughing. 

If left untreated, it can lead to a deadly cardiac arrest. 

Dr William Abraham, lead study author and a professor of medicine, physiology and cell biology at Ohio State University, said his fellow clinicians were hearing changes in patients’ voices when they came to the hospital with pulmonary edema – an abnormal fluid buildup in the lungs. 

Fluid in the lungs causes the patient to generate less air and airways to become congested, making a person’s voice sound muffled. 

Speech can be affected by fluid buildup because it causes swelling of the vocal cords and swelling in the soft tissues and the vocal tract.

Researchers wanted to know if the changes in their patients’ voices were detectable earlier, since doctors may not communicate with their patients every day.

‘The lungs are the energy generator of speech,’ Dr Abraham told reporters at the American Heart Association conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Patients are prompted every morning to use their phones and speak six sentences into the app, called HearO. 

The data is then uploaded to a data-protected cloud-based system where it is analyzed and where the ‘AI magic occurs’. 

The patient acts as their own control, and the app will alert the patient’s clinician if there is a significant change from the patient’s baseline voice that could indicate or predict worsening heart failure.

In a study, 416 adults in Israel who were diagnosed with heart failure were enrolled to test how well the app worked. 

The participants were an elderly group of heart failure patients who were clinically stable but at risk of their condition worsening, based on prior heart failure and hospitalizations.

Over 250,000 voice recordings were assessed by the app’s AI system to come up with its predictive algorithm.

There were a total of 72 heart failure events in the study, and the AI was able to predict first hospitalizations with 81 percent accuracy.

A heart failure event was defined as a patient’s heart failure worsening to the point of requiring hospitalization.

Overall, the app detected roughly 76 percent of impending or future heart failure events.

Crucially, it predicted these an average of 24 days in advance of the patient needing to go to the hospital.

This gives a ‘broad window of opportunity for medical intervention, to perhaps allow us to keep these patients well and avert a future heart failure hospitalization, or the need for IV diuretic therapy in the treatment of these patients,’ Dr Abraham said.

Dr Abraham told DailyMail.com the technology is far superior to a human doctor.

He said: ‘The doctor has to wait until there are visible signs or symptoms of worsening heart failure. This approach detects it before those signs and symptoms occur.

‘Typically the [visible] signs and symptoms [of heart failure] develop only two or three days before the hospitalization. Here, we get three weeks warning.’

The app is currently being tested in a Phase III clinical trial.