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by JPLeRouzic 3273 days ago
Since I retired I lead a non profit [0] that aims at inventing medical tools like continuous glucose monitoring. We did not made any breakthrough, it is just engineering on paper with little PoC as there is little money. The inventions were published without IP claim, there are one or two downloads each week, but nobody contacted us.

This year we registered on HackaDay[1] for a early heart failure (HF) detector. Most aging adult suffers from HF, sometimes as early as when they are in their forties.

Our design is good, the gold standard here is the Physionet 2016 competition, Physionet 2016 competitors mostly used machine learning on file wide features such as the heart rate and its variability. We choose to find features in heart sounds, there are up to four sounds per beat. The code is on Github. The project on HaD will be declared finished in September or October.

We will have huge problems when we will reach the point of trying to obtain a regulator agreement (EC/FDA). It needs to make travels, provide samples, make clinical studies, rise awareness. Lot of problems that we are not equipped to manage.

If we succeed at this there are other R&D projects in the pipeline, to keep us busy.

[0] https://padiracinnovation.org/

[1] https://hackaday.io/project/19685-early-and-low-cost-detecti...

[2] https://github.com/Hjertesvikt

1 comments

Cool. Looks like there will be a lot coming through the pipeline in this space, given the open nature of the machine learning community.

There was another Kaggle competition on lung cancer that recently finished up, and the winner shared their code.

Is your plan to take things like this and put them through the required red tape?

What are you doing to raise funds?

Thanks for the kind message. There are excellent teams doing Kaggle competitions. I tried last fall to make some students aware of Kaggle but they were not interested.

We did not try to raise funds, it was difficult when there was nothing concrete to show. But now we can show a simple app that can classify a heart sound as normal or not. For example in [0] there is a ultra simple app (one button!) that classified my heart sounds as not normal, in less than one second.

I am thinking about making a kickstarter in December or next January to rise awareness about the detector and to raise some money.

[0] https://padiracinnovationdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/...