Roeland Decorte grew up In Belgium, where she learned to spot the subtle early signs of mental decline in small changes in the way residents walked or talked, Decorte was 11 and her father, who owned and operated the home, began waking her up in the middle of the night with chest pains and an overwhelming sense of impending doom.
He went to two doctors, who briefly listened to his heartbeat through their stethoscopes and diagnosed him with anxiety. But the symptoms persisted and it was only when he underwent a full series of scans at a private hospital that a third doctor discovered the source of the problem: a small hole between the left and right chambers of his heart. Had it not been detected, it would have killed him – he was 39.
With disaster averted, young Decorte was able to focus on his studies and by the age of 17 he was a student at Cambridge University, the youngest Belgian ever to attend the prestigious institution. (This caused some logistical problems: his tutor had to become his legal guardian, and a new payment system had to be implemented at the university bar to prevent him from buying alcohol like his classmates.)
He spent the next seven years specialising in cracking ancient codes, with a comfortable career in academia (or a more exciting one as an Indiana Jones-style relic hunter) awaiting him. But Decorte never stopped thinking about what had happened to his father, and how he might have been diagnosed much sooner if a doctor – any doctor – had spent more than 30 seconds listening to his heart. So in 2019, with no medical training but armed with the confidence that only an Oxbridge education can bring, Decorte, then 27, founded a company and turned his attention to cracking a different ancient code: the secret rhythm of the heart.
Artificial intelligence is booming in healthcare, and the only thing holding it back is a lack of data. Meanwhile, doctors, pressed for time, can only gather information sporadically. Wearable devices like smartwatches can measure pulse, but they are not good at making more specific diagnoses (partly because the wrist is as far away from vital organs as possible).
Decorte wanted to develop a piece of technology that could monitor the body continuously and precisely, so that people like his father could get the treatment they needed more quickly. He started by trying to embed sensors in clothing so that people could monitor their vital signs without having to go to the doctor. Then he designed an elaborate exoskeleton packed with sensors to measure all sorts of ailments. This attracted some military interest, but it wouldn’t have really helped someone like Decorte’s father. “I was very naive,” he said when we met recently in the wood-panelled basement of a café in Mayfair, London. “For two years I worked full-time in the spare room of my house doing nothing else.” But the problem he constantly ran into was noise: unless you could build a contraption that pressed each sensor directly against the skin, there was too much random interference from people moving around the world to get a good idea of what was actually happening in the body.