Cardiologs, a French specialist in artificial intelligence (AI) cardiology diagnostics, is showing how to use smartwatches for remote cardiac patient monitoring at this week’s Heart Rhythm conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Cardiologs RPM platform is the company’s first venture into the remote patient monitoring space, bringing its ECG analysis tool to a more direct level of patient care with the goal of going beyond the world of arrhythmias.

A growing number of smartwatches are now capable of capturing an ECG, and older adults are increasingly using them to monitor various aspects about their personal health. Devices such as the Apple Watch are approved by the FDA as cardiac monitors that can be used to detect atrial fibrillation (AFib) and better understand patients’ symptoms.

In a recent study involving Cardiologs AI, ECG data collected with smartwatches was also used to monitor QT-prolongation, a life-threatening heart rhythm disorder that is associated with more than 300 commonly-used drugs.

“It is an exciting trend to see patients embracing this technology, which has the potential to transform the traditional care pathway by enabling a much closer following of their condition,” said Jagmeet Singh, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “However, this places a burden on physicians like we have never seen before and it’s great to see that Cardiologs is entering this space to address this problem.”

While smartwatch users can easily take an ECG whenever they want, sharing and handling that information remains a challenge. Today, most patients have to send their ECG recordings manually in PDF format via email to their clinicians. The frequency with which patients can record and share results creates a fast-growing and overwhelming amount of data that are decentralised, untriaged and non-billable to analyse. The lack of data integration into the clinical workflow is a key reason why few cardiac professionals are ready to embrace smartwatch capabilities.

“The unstructured and decentralised flow of clinical information is limiting smartwatches from making their way into clinical practice at scale,” said Yann Fleureau, Cardiologs CEO. “Our platform will address these challenges by automating and streamlining the data-sharing and data-reviewing process. The Cardiologs RPM platform will prioritise the data and information that need the most attention, provide physicians with an efficient workflow to review ECG strips, and implement a billing mechanism to monetise time spent on analysis.”

The platform includes a patient mobile app for secure, seamless and automatic ECG data transfer and patient engagement optimisation, and a physician cloud-based platform to centralise and triage data according to their clinical relevance, as well as streamline ECG review.

The platform will enable precision medicine in cardiac practices, empowering doctors to know what types of treatment are successful, which treatment plans need to be escalated, or when dosing needs to be adjusted. Physicians could now be able to leverage cardiac data in real time to pinpoint the right treatments for each individual patient.

Cardiologs is a medical technology company committed to transforming cardiac diagnostics using medical-grade artificial intelligence and cloud technology. Developed in partnership with physicians, the Cardiologs Holter platform empowers clinicians worldwide to deliver cardiac care faster and more efficiently. CE-marked and FDA cleared for detection of 14 cardiac arrhythmias, the Holter platform is built on a growing database of more than 20 million ECG recordings and is supported by a number of clinical publications.