Roeland Decorte has developed in a nursing home in Belgium, where he learned to spot the subtle early signs of mental decline in small changes in the way residents walked or talked. When Decorte was 11, his father, who owned and managed the nursing home, began waking up in the middle of the night with chest pains and a deep sense of dread that the world was about to end.
He saw two doctors, who listened to his heartbeat through a stethoscope 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. If left undetected, it would have killed him—he was 39.
Disaster averted, young Decorte was able to concentrate on his studies, and by the age of 17 he had become an undergraduate at Cambridge University—the youngest Belgian ever to attend the prestigious university. (This presented some logistical problems: His tutor had to become his legal guardian, and a new payment system had to be introduced at the university bar to prevent him from buying alcohol like his friends.)
He spent the next seven years deciphering ancient codes, and a comfortable career in academia (or, more excitingly, as an Indiana Jones-style relic hunter) beckoned. 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, lacking medical training but armed with the confidence that only an Oxbridge education can provide, the then 27-year-old Decorte founded a company and focused on deciphering another ancient code: the secret rhythms of the heart.
There is one Artificial Intelligence burst in health careand the only thing slowing it down is a lack of data. Meanwhile, time-pressed doctors can only gather information sporadically. Wearable devices like smart watch Pulses can be measured, but they are not effective in making a more specific diagnosis (partly because the wrist is as far away as possible from the truly vital organs).
Decorte wanted to develop technology that could monitor the body continuously and accurately, so that people like his father could get the treatment they needed faster. He started by trying to integrate sensors into clothing so people could monitor their vital signs without having to see a doctor. Then he designed a complex exoskeleton packed with sensors to measure all sorts of ailments. This attracted some interest from the military but didn’t really help someone like Decorte’s father. “I was very naive,” he said when we met recently in the wood-paneled basement of a small cafe in Mayfair, London. “For about two years, I was just working full-time in a spare room in my house, doing nothing else.” But the problem he kept running into was noise: Unless you can build a machine that presses each sensor right into the skin, there’s too much random interference from people moving around in the world to get a good sense of what’s actually happening in the body.
