

CardioID Technologies – Pervasive heart signals - capcarr
http://www.cardio-id.com

======
atria
Disclaimer: I'm writing software for a company that offers FDA approved pace-
makers, defibrillators, and implantable heart monitors. These comments are my
own.

No where on your site do you reference FDA approval and I see that you are not
in the U.S., so take my comments with a grain of salt.

Bio-metric authentication using cardiac wave forms? I'm not sure that is a
good way to go, but it sure sounds good. What happens when the user takes
medications that changes the waveform (ie., they start new blood pressure
medicine or cardiac meds, or intermittently take those meds)? What if the user
has PVCs when trying to authenticate? What about diabetics with high glucose
levels?

The only time I've seen a legitimate use for using ECG in a
consumer/commercial application is detecting a pulse when a user is attempting
validate a finger print. I worked with a guy who had to implement something
for ATMs being shipped to Africa. They required the user to authenticate with
a finger print scanner in order to withdraw money. It wasn't long before
people were loosing their fingers.

As far as monitoring for cardiac anomalies, they don't happen all the time.
Your device only appears to work when you hands are touching it. It often
takes days or weeks for them to occur, requiring continuous monitoring for
days, weeks, and sometimes months.

~~~
capcarr
Medical certification is something that we're not pursuing at the moment. For
now, we intend to raise alerts to the user, in case we detect something
suspicious, referring them to their medical doctor. We do not claim to detect
cardiac pathologies that are rare, and need several ECG derivations to be
correctly diagnosed.

What we do offer is the possibility of more frequent ECG monitoring, beyond
the 10 second ECG exam that most people do only once or twice per year. For
example, driving is a stressful environment, where a major cardiac event is
more likely to occur. In a car with our technology, we would be able to detect
when that event happens, thus preventing a crash by automatically stopping the
car, and calling emergency services.

Regarding signal variability due to medication and other pathologies, that's
something we have to account for, with robust feature extraction methods that
are invariant to these changes, or adapt to them.

~~~
atria
I'm not familiar with European regulations, or medical procedures, but in the
U.S., a medical diagnosis can only be made by a qualified licensed medical
professional. Even making statements about diagnosing disease states via
software or smartphones is enough to invoke an FDA response.

------
mmaha
Check out Nymi [[https://www.nymi.com/](https://www.nymi.com/)], also in this
space.

~~~
capcarr
We are aware of Nymi, they have cited some of our ECG biometrics research
papers, and we theirs. But Nymi makes the user constantly wear a band. As soon
as you take off the band, their authentication stops working. Also, you have
one more gadget to charge. In CardioID's case, the ECG sensors are embedded
into everyday life objects, so the system is ready whenever the user wishes
it. Beyond that, we also continuously track other heart parameters, like heart
rate and cardiac arrhythmias.

~~~
746F7475
But if you have several locations where you'd like to log in you require
multiple of these devices, right?

With wrist band you could sell to something like FitBit or just add step-,
distance-, calorie tracking, watch, silent alarms and call/sms notifications
into the mix.

~~~
capcarr
Yes, you're right. That's why we're primarily targeting a B2B market. Imagine
that a gym has machines with our technology embedded. The gym's users would be
able to seamlessly track their workout across different machines, just by
using them as they normally would, no need for extra weight.

Note that, for continuous ECG monitoring, you need skin contact with 2
electrodes, from different limbs. That's why with Nymi, authentication is
performed only once when the user puts it on, with one finger touching the
visible electrode (the other electrode is on the underside of the band). In
this case, there is no continuous verification of identity, or other
parameters.

------
dang
This looks really cool, but does the product actually exist? The page doesn't
say.

~~~
capcarr
We have several business partners, for which we produced prototypes to be
integrated into their systems. These prototypes include a signal acquisition
hardware interface, a processing unit, and all accompanying software and APIs.

We do not currently have a product directly for sale to individual users.

~~~
dang
Ok, in that case "Show HN" shouldn't be in the title
([https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)).
But please do a Show HN when you're ready to show the actual product.

In the meantime, if you want to do it, I think a post that goes into technical
detail about how it works and what people can do with it would likely be of
interest to the HN community.

Good luck!

~~~
capcarr
Ok, thanks. I should've read the guidelines more carefully.

We were already planning on posting a more detailed overview.

------
tricky
Why don't you have any cardiologists on your team?

~~~
capcarr
We do have research collaborations with cardiologists, but we consider them to
be advisers, not officially part of the team. However, two team members are
biomedical engineers, with expertise in the medical field.

