Tech startup Heart Up has come up with an innovative idea to help you understand your heart health and how to make it more efficient and resistant. They’ve created a one-fingered glove that is supposed to predict your cardiovascular health on the run.
Endurance athletes occasionally drop from heart attacks while racing or training. A recent study of more than 9 million triathlon participants over 30 years found that 1.74 out of every 100,000 competitors suffered cardiac arrests and death. While this may not seem like a lot, the risk is higher than the annual risk of death for a middle-aged adult in the general population, reports Gadgets & Wearables.
Heart Up wanted to reduce these fatalities, so it developed this technology. “We can claim 98 percent accuracy for heart rate and oxygenation saturation monitoring,” said Andres Mejia of Heart Up.
The device, which attaches to the tip of your finger, uses sensors and machine learning to monitor your vitals. It lets you track your workout, analyze performance, calories burnt and distance. It can double up as a GPS sport watch when synced to an iPhone or Android smartphone.
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Heart Up measures a deluge of vital stats on your cardiovascular health. This includes your real-time heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation, Tachycardia/Bradycardia and sleep apnea. The company is also working on a cardiovascular index which will make it easier for you to understand the real status of your heart.
The technology seems promising. It will be a groundbreaking invention if it can actually predict and help prevent deaths in triathlons and other endurance activities.
Some athletes have heart conditions they don’t know about. This means they may be ignoring symptoms and putting their lives on the line when going out to train.
Heart Up hopes its wearable device will catch both the one-off heart attack and those possibly connected to long-term conditions or underlying diseases
So far, the device has been tested on 80 patients in a French hospital, 60% of whom were suffering from some form of heart condition. The glove’s features were beta tested by an Olympic middle-distance runner.
Like most sports smartwatches, the glove measures beats per minute (BPM). Monitoring BPM while running can keep your heart from danger zone. The glove also tracks other basic workout stuff like calories burned and miles run.
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But Heart Up goes beyond that. “The interface will analyze your heart performance during training sessions, and off as well, and will predict the evolution of your cardiovascular activity,” said Mejia.
The smart glove comes in left- and right-handed configurations in sizes XS to XL. It is available now on Kickstarter, with prices starting at $69.
