Roeland Decorte has grown in a nursing home in Belgium, where he learned to spot subtle, early signs of mental deterioration in petite changes in the way residents walked and spoke. When Decorte was 11, his father, who owned and operated the nursing home, began waking 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 stethoscopes and diagnosed him with anxiety. But the symptoms persisted, and it wasn’t until he underwent a full set of scans at a private hospital that a third doctor discovered the source of the problem—a miniature hole between the left and right ventricles of the heart. If it hadn’t been spotted, it would have killed him—he was 39.
Disaster averted, juvenile Decorte was able to focus on his studies and at 17 he was a student at Cambridge University – the youngest Belgian ever to attend the prestigious university. (This caused some logistical problems: his guardian had to become his legal guardian, and a fresh payment system had to be introduced at the college bar to prevent him from buying alcohol like his peers.)
He spent the next seven years specializing in cracking old 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 happened to his father, and how he might have been diagnosed much earlier 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 degree can bring, Decorte, then 27, started a company and set his sights on cracking another old code: the secret rhythm of the heart.
The AI boom in healthcare is here, and the only thing holding it back is a lack of data. Meanwhile, doctors, pressed for time, can only gather information sporadically. Wearables like smartwatches can measure heart rate but are lousy at more detailed diagnoses (partly because the wrist is as far from the really significant organs as you can get).
Decorte wanted to develop technology that could monitor the body continuously and precisely, so people like his father could get the treatment they needed faster. He started by trying to build sensors into clothes so people could track their vital signs without going to a doctor. Then he designed a complicated exoskeleton packed with sensors to measure all sorts of ailments. That attracted some interest from the military, but it wouldn’t really support someone like Decorte’s father. “I was very naive,” he said when we met recently in the wood-paneled basement of a coffee shop in Mayfair, London. “I worked full-time in the spare room of my house for about two years and didn’t do anything else.” But the problem he kept running into was noise: Unless you could build a device that pressed every sensor directly against your skin, there was too much random interference from people moving around the world to get a good picture of what was actually going on in the body.