I-Corps: Noninvasive method for assessing cardiovascular stress arising from acute exposure to nanoparticles

As modern technology has made the collection of vast amounts of data of all kinds extremely cheap and easy, new approaches to analyzing such information are required for this type of technology to be truly useful. In particular, the advent of affordable and portable electrocardiogram (ECG) measurement devices has enabled collection and storage of hours of detailed information about patients? personal cardiovascular system. However, the untrained individual's limited ability to interpret this raw information limits the revolutionary healthcare potential of such technology. Consequently, there is no decrease in required face-to-face visits with a physician, and many ethical questions arise regarding storage, transmission and responsibility of the doctor to monitor such information. In this project, this I-Corps team outlines a strategy for taking such technology to the next level of personalization by incorporating a novel metric for cardiovascular health into currently available portable ECG measurement devices.

The ability to extract meaningful information from a large set of data is of paramount importance in the digital age. At its core, the proposed technology isolates the degrees of freedom within the cardiovascular system that govern a particular aspect of the heart's response to external stresses including pollutants. By enabling real-time measurement of the cardiac muscle physical ability to recover from a single contraction through the so-called 'reserve of refractoriness' (RoR), the door to non-invasive assessment of exposure to arbitrary types of potential pollutants is opened. A remarkable feature of introduced metric is its lack of sensitivity to the inherent noise in low-resolution, single-lead ECG measurement devices. Such a stiffness makes the proposed refractoriness metric an ideal method for analyzing the cardiovascular system in a variety of practical contexts. Specifically, the proposed technology demonstrates how it may be rewarding for the medical industry, companies with concern for occupational or environmental hazards, as well as for the vast fitness industry.