This article was taken from the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Since her husband's death in 2002, Marie Johnson, founder and CEO of Minnesota-based AUM Cardiovascular, has been on a mission to keep the world's hearts pumping. "I was working on my PhD with a stethoscope company, so I'd been collecting all this data from my husband as a normal patient," she explains. "Then nine months later, he died from a sudden cardiac event."
Johnson had noticed an unusual signal amid his readings, but a treadmill stress test had given the all-clear. Realising that this signal might act as a warning for conditions undetected by standard testing, she dug deeper and discovered that in 1967 an American doctor, William Dock, had identified a murmur associated with a blockage in the left anterior descending artery -- the same one that caused her husband's heart attack. "This acoustic signal is so quiet that you can't hear it 99.99 per cent of the time," she says.
Johnson set out to determine if it signified a blockage or narrowing of any of the four main coronary vessels by creating the CADence, a high-fidelity sensor and an analytical algorithm. This non-invasive hand-held detector has been shown to be more accurate than most standard tests. The device was approved for the European market last November; a German launch is set for early this year.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
