Amazon's Alexa Could Be Used To Detect Irregular Heartbeats

SEATTLE — Researchers at the University of Washington are working on a program that would allow smart speakers to detect irregular heartbeats, potentially saving lives.

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home have been used to detect healthcare issues in the past, but nothing quite like this. The idea is simple to explain, though certainly much more difficult in practice: UW's program has the speaker emit an inaudible sound, which then pings off the user's body. The device picks up the sound as it bounces back, and uses that to determine the user's heart rate — and if their heart is beating irregularly.

To demonstrate the technology, the team has built a working prototype speaker which does just that.

The University of Medicine says, if this new technology was integrated into existing Amazon Echo or Google Home systems, it could help save lives.

"Heart-rhythm disorders are actually more common than some other well-known heart conditions," said co-senior author Dr. Arun Sridhar. "Cardiac arrhythmias can cause major morbidities such as strokes, but can be highly unpredictable in occurrence, and thus difficult to diagnose,. Availability of a low-cost test that can be performed frequently and at the convenience of home can be a game-changer for certain patients in terms of early diagnosis and management."

The current system requires the user to sit still in front of the smart speaker, but the team is hopeful that in the future it could be used farther away, to continuously monitor the user's heartbeat as they go about their lives.

"If you have a device like this, you can monitor a patient on an extended basis and define patterns that are individualized for the patient. For example, we can figure out when arrhythmias are happening for each specific patient and then develop corresponding care plans that are tailored for when the patients actually need them," said Sridhar. "This is the future of cardiology. And the beauty of using these kinds of devices is that they are already in people's homes."

The team tested their prototype on 26 healthy participants and 24 patients who had been hospitalized for a variety of heart conditions, and compared the speaker's findings against a standard, professional heartbeat monitor. In healthy patients, the speaker was only about 28 milliseconds off from the monitor. Readings on cardiac patients averaged about 30 milliseconds off. Researchers say, that's a very good start.

"Regular heartbeats are easy enough to detect even if the signal is small, because you can look for a periodic pattern in the data," said co-senior author Shyam Gollakota. "But irregular heartbeats are really challenging because there is no such pattern. I wasn't sure that it would be possible to detect them, so I was pleasantly surprised that our algorithms could identify irregular heartbeats during tests with cardiac patients."