Back in March 2019, eMurmur announced the release of eMurmur Heartpedia. The app had taken years to develop and is designed to help patients, care-givers and medical professionals to detect a wide range of heart defects.
The care-giver uses a digital stethoscope and the recorded sounds are identified through the app via web-based artificial intelligence.
As Peace Madueme, MD MS FAAP FACC FASE at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Orlando said back in March:
eMurmur Heartpedia is unique in that it provides validated patient heart sounds, 3D cardiac models and surgical videos in an easy to use app that is accessible and understandable by anyone.”
And the hard work at eMurmur has certainly paid off. It has been announced today that the company has received FDA approval for their eMurmur Heartpedia smart phone application.
It is the first AI-powered mobile app to detect heart murmurs to be cleared by the FDA.
The method of detection is ingenious. A third party stethoscope can be used by any person with moderate knowledge of how to operate one.
The recording is then uploaded via the mobile app to a HIPAA-compliant server.
It is here that the sound is analyzed against a large database of pre-recorded heart sounds and cardiologist annotations accumulated over years of study across a broad range of patient heart conditions and age.
As stated by Andreas Schriefl, founder and CEO of eMurmur:
The rich visual and audio heart information in eMurmur Heartpedia make it much easier to understand heart defects, which we expect will be invaluable to families, healthcare professionals, medical and nursing schools.”
This technologically advanced platform is opening the doors for doctors, nurses and other practitioners to have access to a vast databank of information via an easy to use application on their smartphone.
The end result is greater accuracy on the spot, without the need for a specifically trained specialist to be on site in order to confirm diagnosis.
eMurmur have stated that the technology can be used for an ever increasing range of medical issues, including other cardiovascular disease indicators related to heart failure. There is the whole subject of auscultation and related lung conditions too.
The future for the application technology is certainly exciting. And as far as eMurmur Heartpedia goes, the company aims to secure a CE mark for their app later this month.
eMurmur Heartpedia can be downloaded from either the IOS and Android app stores, depending on your device.
