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If a doctor used a stethoscope with an app to diagnose me, I would get a second oppinion
If you want a second opinion feel free to ask the roomba.
The fridge would also like a word.
Audio recordings in this would be useful, but the rest just kills the product.
If done well, training AI on this kind of data could be a good thing. It could make say your smartphone (for example) tell you that you have a problem, be used as a first diagnostic and so on. Invaluable in countries where doctors are scarce for example.
If I understand correctly the patients consent is never asked before their data is collected, I could easily see this data being sold to advertising companies. Imagine having a heart attack and when you get home all you see is ads for life insurance.
Giving each person in a hospital a $300 stethoscope + $200 phone + $120 for the subscription + a whole new IT team is simply too expensive when hospitals already struggle to afford basic supplies like vaccines.
I said if it's done correctly, so with consent etc. ofc.
You are totally wrong though IMO when it comes to costs, check this startup out if you are curious, I don't know how they collect their data but their aim is to bring cheap heart scans to the world. You might have an IT team (IDK) but not at each hospital, and probably those things could be standalone if extreme cost savings are needed, otherwise you'd like them connected so when there is a potential problem the real doctor can take over.
That start up is extremely silly.
The concept that early detection is always of benefit in long term disease outcomes has recently come under scrutiny and has been discredited or moderated in a number of areas. PSA tests in average risk, asymptomatic people being very prominent. They were found to cause significantly more harm than benefit which is why you don't see PSAs (ha) telling you check your PSA all the time anymore.
Claiming that any kind of diagnostic imaging will make a dent in a massively common problem is ridiculous. I see no reason to believe that, just a lot of marketing hype. They don't even say what specific problems they are supposed to be preventing, or treating, or finding, or whatever. "Cardiac disease" is a large category. It's like saying "skin problems" or "mental health".
It looks like these people are claiming to be able to perform a cardiac doppler and/or ultrasound? It specifically says it does not interpret it. It produces the image. Generally speaking, that's the easier part of the job.
I tried to look up what the value of a doppler might be in screening for cardiac disease. Most analysis and guidelines about cardiac screening do not even mention dopplers. Some mention very specific ultrasounds in specific situations. Always along with a bunch of other stuff.
See example - table 3 summary of reccomendations
try to find anything there that has any apparent relationship to this app.
The most general screening for cardiac disease are blood pressure, family history, a risk calculation (like Framingham which you can do online), and sometimes a few simple blood tests.
All in all the claims being made here are ostentatious and unrealistic. This device may have some kind of application but it is not what is claimed here.
If you didn't understand what they are aiming for; it's AI driven diagnostic help, so that say a nurse with a 3 month course can screen heart disease (which one? IDK, but does it matter?) thus not needing a heart surgeon, all the time. We're not talking about some basic blood pressure test here.
Quite interesting IMO.
It won't solve all heart diseases ofc, that would be silly to think
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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