MobilECG
mobilecg.hu
mobilecg.hu
I am Male, 38, a geek and overweight. In the last few years started having heart issues and had many 7 day event monitors. However, never managed to capture what my issue was. Each 7 day event monitor cost my medical insurance £3k! (In the UK). I spent hours on google researching and understanding arrhythmia. Most are benign, but not all.
What most people don't know is that an ECG machine or event monitor is all well and good, but for a lot of problems it needs to be attached when you have the incident. I have only had 5 incidents in 3 years. They could be harmless or they cloud kill me, but until you find out what they are its impossible to tell.
If this was on the market I would buy it, anyone that has had heart issues would know how important something like this is to get built and delivered into the market. The problem is, most people won't know they need this until later in life if at all.
Don't give up, please get this to market devices like this will save lives or at the very least reduce anxiety of people going through their first heart health issues to get a diagnosis of the problem.
Good luck!
I asked the doctor why there wasn't something cheaper that did this better. He had no idea. How companies can charge this much for simple devices is beyond me. They aren't that complex...
Conversely, there is hardly any money in mental illness. Mental illness has a lot of patients that are younger and impoverished.
Anyway, making medical equipment isn't something that's just one step above a breadboard. Have a look at the article again - to get the regulatory stamps, for someone who's willing to sell at zero profit, will take $230k. For one product. Throw a lot of infrastructure around that, and it's easy to see how medical hardware costs a lot. Especially given that it's generally pretty low turnover. Sure, there's a nice amount of fat in there, but you get that in industries with a high barrier to entry.
There's a less expensive thermal imager in development at http://muoptics.com, so I don't see why the principles can't be applied. Cheaper devices can only mean better health for all.
It's a highly portable version of a very specialized diagnostic tool.
If you're using the 12-lead by itself, you don't care about portability (as you're in a doctor's office or hospital). A 12-lead on a wheeled cart is just fine.
If you're using the 12-lead in a situation where portability matters (i.e. the back of an ambulance), then you need a lot more than just a 12-lead. You need something like a Lifepack 15, which combines an ECG with all sorts of other monitoring equipment (auto blood pressure cuff, pulseox, capnography, defibrillation capabilities, etc). An LP15 is not cheap (a mid-level version costs _5_ times as much as the last used car I bought), but it does what it does very well, and packs a lot into a small package.
Of all the factors considered by people who purchase things like 12-lead ECGs, price is often well down on that list.
All that being said... Would I buy one for $110? In a heartbeat.
An ECG is a step beyond that, but I can see it being super cool to play with, and who knows what sort of ideas you could come up with! I know at this price, I'll definitely get one.
>Fed up with the unreasonably high price, cumbersome design, and dishonest distribution practices of clinical ECG machines, I decided to create mobilECG, a clinical ECG that is different.
Maybe one day we'll see some more open sourced sophisticated equipment, which are not only portable, but also reasonably priced and better designed.
What might work is approaching charities eager to develop this device for use in the developing world.
I think it would serve the purpose better if he uses this money to make it user friendly and polished.