Toyota to develop a new system that could predict heart attack

Scientists are developing a new system that would be able to predict if a car driver is about to have a heart attack. The feature would help avoid road accidents due to an unexpected cardiac event.

Speaking on the development, Kayvan Najarian, a researcher from the University of Michigan in the US, noted that when a person has a medical emergency behind the wheel, fellow passengers and motorists also face the risk of death or serious injury.

Najarian further said that a large number of traffic incidents are caused by medical conditions while driving, specifically cardiovascular events, such as myocardial infraction and myocardial ischemia.

Key Highlights

• The heart monitoring technology is being developed by researchers in collaboration with Japanese automotive manufacturer Toyota.

• The technology would be able to monitor and analyse the physiology of the person driving and predict if they are going to have adverse cardiac events.

• The system would be such that could be placed in the vehicle to monitor and predict an adverse cardiac event.

• The researchers have identified the challenges, potential solutions, hardware options and algorithmic approaches that could be potentially used for its creation.

Ideation Process

“We would like to test hardware we had previously identified and improve and validate our algorithmic solutions to see what it will take to generate a system that could look at the physiology of a person, provided by high-density electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements, as well as other medical measurements,” Najarian said.

The main goal is to come up with a system that would predict the occurrence of adverse cardiac events in real time.

Technological intervention

• Researchers are using machine-learning models to analyse the data collected from in-hospital and in-vehicle subjects.

• The research team will then test the system on real-time prediction of cardiac events.

• The research team will begin gathering the physiological data from the driver using heart monitors approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

• Such monitors are patches placed on the driver’s chest that analyse physiological data in real time.

• Researchers will continue to test and validate algorithmic and hardware options that could be placed inside the vehicle to monitor the driver’s heart.

• The team hopes to report results by the year 2020.