track heart health
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of needing continuous EKG monitoring, you’ve probably used a Holter monitor. It’s like carrying a 1980s walkman made of metal with a bunch of wires going from it to your chest. If that sounds uncomfortable, and as if you won’t sleep or enjoy showers much for the two weeks you need to carry it around, you’ve neatly stumbled across the use case for the Mawi Heart Patch. The company just released its product, a two-lead cardiac monitor that can be read in real time.
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There are consumer-grade products that can do EKG readings, including the Withings ScanWatch (and its fancier-looking sibling, the ScanWatch Horizon), and there are other patches on the market, such as the Zio patch, but Mawi claims to have done something unique, and suggests that its Heart Patch is the first ever single-use, two-lead cardiac monitor to reach the market.
The company describes it as “a stick-and-go, wireless solution” and further suggests that the disposable nature of the device is a benefit; it means that cardiologists can run tests on as many patients as they need to without having to wait for reusable Holter monitors to come back from other patients and get sanitized and maintained between uses.
“Holter monitors aren’t great,” Andrew Klymenko, the CEO of Mawi, says drily in an interview we did last week, and explains that the existing solutions are prone to dislodging, peeling and causing allergic reactions, thus restricting monitoring time. As a result, Mawi claims that more than 50% of arrhythmias go undetected. Equally bad: patients have to wait up to a month to receive the results.
Mawi Heart Patch, the company claims, can be applied in under a minute, and you can live like normal as you wear it.
“Patients can shower, sleep, work out,” says Klymenko, and highlights that it’s possible to wear the patch and live all aspects of life as normal. “Sex is a big and important part of life, and patients can have sex as normal when wearing the Mawi patch.”
track heart health
