A Device to Detect Impending Heart Attacks

Bloomberg.com‘s Simeon Bennett has some info on a gadget from Australia’s HD Medical Group that uses mechanical data (basically sound) to predict impending heart attacks…

HD Medical Group Ltd. said it will test its wireless device, which is able to detect heart noises that can signal an impending attack, on as many as 500 patients in a clinical trial at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital starting next month. Results of the trial may be available by the end of the year, with an application for approval to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration possible in early 2008, the company’s managing director Jay Jethwa said in a telephone interview today.
The device works by sending and receiving low-voltage radio waves to and from the heart, similar to the way fisherman use sonar waves to locate fish, Jethwa said. It’s a combination of the company’s proprietary ViScope instrument and technology licensed from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization in December last year.

More from Bloomberg.com and HD Medical themselves.
Product brochure (.pdf)…