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Pulse is building consumer health technology that gives active people visibility into their heart activity and the agency to move their bodies in fuller ways.
We do this by offering a wearable patch that continuously collects ECG data and provides regular, actionable feedback to the user about their heart’s activity. With a growing heart-conscious public, no everyday consumer product exists to provide continuous AI-backed ECG monitoring, which is essential to identifying high-risk markers and providing real-time feedback for preventative action. Our goal is to increase the quality of life for individuals who lack visibility into their cardiac health by combining cutting-edge machine learning with an elegant form factor.
Our core ambition is to build an ML-driven approach to modeling ECG data, paired with a predictive pipeline and malignant arrhythmia detection. The accuracy of this model is dependent on data. Therefore, our immediate goal is to launch a lightweight and inconspicuous wearable patch worn on the chest that continuously reads ECG and provides real-time feedback based on heart rate. As this product is providing initial value to our users, we are collecting a holistic aggregate dataset that is fuller and has a higher resolution than any consumer device on the market, to inform the heart rhythm detection and prediction ML models we will build in the next iteration.
We are undergraduate seniors in the USC Iovine & Young Academy and Viterbi School of Engineering. We have spent our time in research and industry to inform our direction and have grown our network of advisors with researchers, practitioners, and technology experts. With a small but nimble team of engineers, product strategists, medical researchers, and designers, we are constantly testing assumptions and finding new discoveries.
Pulse addresses the needs of the following demographics:
There are two categories of products in this market:
While the former provides an initial introduction to cardiac insights for everyday people, their wrist-based form factor limits the type of data that can be collected to continuous heart rate, but not heart rhythm, therefore hindering them from providing high-quality, substantial feedback to the user. The latter are bulky, obtrusive, and uncomfortable chest patches intended to be used for short periods of time, so they miss out on crucial data outside of the prescribed time period. They are physician-facing and provide no actionable insight directly to the user.
<aside> <img src="/icons/light-bulb_gray.svg" alt="/icons/light-bulb_gray.svg" width="40px" /> This is why we are building Pulse. We tap into this unserved market with a significant competitive advantage through our:
Conceptual design of our wearable patch
When considering diagnosed individuals, excluding pre-diagnosis or family history, there is a market of 121.5 million individuals in the U.S. who would benefit from continuous heart monitoring [AHA]. More specifically, almost 5% of the US population has experienced aFib, the most common arrhythmia [CDC]. The Wearable Cardiac Devices Market Size exceeded USD 1.5 billion in 2020 and is expected to witness a 24.7% compound annual growth USD 8 billion by 2027, led by the increasing cardiovascular disease occurrence, growing geriatric population, rising popularity of wearable tech, and growing preference towards remote healthcare [GMI]. Now is an incredibly promising time to be developing Pulse.
Pulse is a complex project, backed by a team driven by simplicity. We are energized by curiosity, creativity, experimentation, and quality.
Pulse was started in 2017 at MIT Launch and has taken the form of a research project for commercialization, an excuse to play with sensors and wires, and now, a startup that we are fully committed to for our senior capstone project. We’ve learned a lot over the years, through speaking with 80+ potential users and 50+ medical & tech experts, conducting in-depth technical, medical, market, and user desk research, participating in pitch competitions as a means to collect feedback and raise funding, and building & testing prototypes.
Our core team includes two students in the USC Iovine & Young Academy, a program that focuses on holistic problem solving from a multi-disciplinary approach, emphasizing the intersection of design, technology, and business. Our education has provided us with unique experience in both, big-picture strategic thinking through challenge-based learning & industry-level client work, and high quality detail-oriented thinking through advanced skill development.
**Richa — Project & Design Lead* BS Arts, Technology, and Business* Richa has honed her product design, user research, and design strategy skills through labs and internships with companies including Apple, Samsung, Adidas, Fisher-Price, Harvard Business Publishing, and the USC Convergent Science Institute in Cancer. She trained competitively and pre-professionally in ballet for 12 years before she was diagnosed with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, which has given her a first-hand view of the problem Pulse strives to solve.
**Shantanu — Technical Strategy Lead* BS Arts, Technology, and Business BS Computer Science* Shantanu has spent his four years at USC deep in research and development. He has focused on combinatorial optimization with a focus in orientation and forecasting problems. He currently works at the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society and the Institute for Creative Technologies, developing novel architectures for human simulation and optimization for non-linear problems.