The world of HeartKey®, does the data support the use?

The pandemic has consumed our world, compromising our health and the economy. Covid-19 has been the catalyst for telemedicine and consumers are demanding quality health and wellness monitoring outside of the hospital environment.  

According to insightful NHS analytics, in March 2020, registrations to the NHS app increased by 111 per cent and the number of repeat prescription requests made online increased by 97 per cent. This paints the same picture we are being told time and again: the appetite for digital solutions is increasing both for consumers and on the clinical side.

We have seen how telemedicine supports clinicians in remaining close to their patients without having the risk of seeing them in person. However, the appeal of telemedicine has reached outside of the clinical environment, with consumers increasingly looking to take control of and monitor their health.

Managing your own health and wellness
At the individual level, telemedicine can support improvements in a patient’s health and quality of life. We’ve all been unwell, or stressed, or burnt out at some point in our lives. These things can be unavoidable at times, but with today’s digital health devices we have the ability to measure our stress levels, quantify our heart health and view holistic trends in our wellbeing; these devices are giving us the tools to identify any issues earlier and make changes in our lives for the better.

The number of connected wearable devices worldwide has more than doubled in the space of three years, increasing from 325 million in 2016 to 722 million in 2019. The number of devices is forecast to reach more than one billion by 2022. This is a rapidly growing industry with vast potential to change so many peoples’ lives.

B-Secur’s Data Research Manager Holly Easlea conducted a real-life stress monitoring exercise two years ago using HeartKey® integrated into a wearable device. Following the success of the first experiment Holly monitored her health and wellness over Christmas 2020, arguably the most stressful year to date. In this article we’ll discuss the insight gleaned from the data and the impact remote monitoring can have.

Understanding the data

Using a Bittium Faros 180 to record a single lead EKG using wet electrodes placed across the chest, Holly wore her device from Christmas Day morning through to Boxing Day evening. The data was extracted from the device and run through the HeartKey® Stress algorithm to gain insights and draw comparisons from the data two years prior. The graph shows the stress levels, with stress scores reported from a value of 0 (lowest stress) to 100 (highest stress).

Holly commented,

“I think I am like a lot of people these days, where I have a keen interest in my data, with particular relation to my health and wellness. HeartKey® brings the ability to accurately monitor my data, so I wanted to see how I really handled the stress over Christmas and of course the excitement that it brings.  Having run this experiment previously the opportunity to draw comparisons was something I was not going to miss!

“Monitoring my data, particularly over a longer period of time allows me to be aware of my body and when I need to make some changes in my life to better look after my health. I feel HeartKey enables me to do this!”

Holly Easlea, Data Research Manager

Validating the data
At B-Secur we use this type of data for further ongoing validation of our algorithms against industry gold standards to ensure HeartKey® is capable of high performance on even the most challenging data. As the number of consumer and healthcare wearables increases, HeartKey®’s complete suite of EKG algorithms and analytics for user identification, health and wellness can empower the next generation of devices with cutting edge technology.