Daijiworld Media Network- Mississippi
Mississippi, May 1: In a significant leap forward in life-saving technology, a team of engineers from the University of Mississippi has unveiled a wearable gadget capable of detecting heart attacks in real time, promising to drastically cut diagnosis time and boost survival rates.
The revolutionary device, developed under the leadership of Dr. Kasem Khalil, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is said to outperform traditional detection methods by being twice as fast and 92.4% accurate — a breakthrough that could redefine emergency cardiac care.
“For this issue, a few minutes or even a few extra seconds is going to give this person the care they need before it becomes worse,” said Dr. Khalil.
Published in Intelligent Systems, Blockchain and Communication Technologies, the study reveals how the team merged artificial intelligence with advanced hardware design to create a lightweight, energy-efficient chip that reads ECGs (electrocardiograms) — the heart’s electrical signals — and flags cardiac arrests as they occur.
Unlike traditional diagnostics, which often require hospital admission, ECGs, and lab tests, this wearable aims to do it all on the go, making heart health monitoring more accessible and immediate.
“This method will save lives because we can monitor the heart in real time,” said Tamador Mohaidat, a doctoral student involved in the project.
“Most labs focus only on software. But we built the entire system — software and hardware — together,” added Md. Rahat Kader Khan, the Bangladeshi graduate student behind the system’s AI algorithm.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that someone dies from a heart attack every 40 seconds in the U.S., making it the leading cause of death. In 2022 alone, over 700,000 Americans died from heart disease — one in every five deaths.
Dr. Khalil emphasized the real-world usability of the device:
“It has to be light, economical, and fast. That’s the only way we make this usable for the masses.”
The wearable, still in its advanced prototype stage, is poised for further testing and could soon bec