Cardiovascular issues are the leading cause of death worldwide. With the modern changes in food and lifestyle, the number is ever increasing. This increases the importance of early detection and treatment of cardiovascular issues. As a result, the ECG sensor patch market is booming worldwide. Many medical and wearable device companies have started manufacturing devices that provide continuous heart monitoring. One such company is—Mawi Heart.
Mawi recently released its Mawi Heart Patch, a seamless heart monitor. It saves patients from discomfort and interruptions, allowing them to perform daily activities stress-free. The device has changed the game for traditional Holter monitoring, as it allows patients to feel comfortable and live a normal life.
Let’s know more about the Mawi heart patch and how it’s making heart monitoring comfortable for patients.
What’s Mawi heart patch?
Mawi Heart Patch is a wireless, stick-and-go cardiac monitor that gives real-time analysis. While the traditional Holter monitor was connected with a bunch of wires, Mawi has no connecting wires, and the data is stored directly in Mawi’s cloud platform.
The patch monitors and collects two-channel ECG data and four vital signs—respiratory rate, skin temperature, activity and heart rate. These parameters help in identifying up to 75 heart diseases such as Atrioventricular (AV) blocks, Atrial Fibrillation, Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT), etc.
“Just stick it on, no wires and no messy straps” – Mawi.
The highlight of the product is it takes only a minute to put on and allows the patient to live a normal life. Patients love its compact size and disposability. “They can shower, sleep, and work out comfortably,” says Andrew Klymenko, Chairman and Co-founder of Mawi.
How does Mawi Heart Patch work?
Mawi patch is built with a simple single piece, one button, and no need to assemble or charge formula. Easy to apply, patients can self-apply the patch at home. Single-use and disposable, the Mawi heart patch is waterproof and can be worn for up to 7 days to collect profound heart data.
All the data is stored in Mawi’s cloud platform, which connects to a smartphone device in the doctor’s office. The device pipes the data through to the cloud, where Cardio Al analyses it and highlights unusual signs for the cardiologists to take a closer look. The process is very quick wherein doctors have a detailed, accurate, and actionable report in less than 24 hours. This enables the doctors to focus on treatment instead of spending time analysing the data.
Mawi heart patch has received FDA 510(k) clearance in the US and CE mark in the UK. It needs to be doctor-prescribed, and pricing depends on the medical insurance and medical care system you operate on. However, the device typically costs ‘under $250 per study’ according to Klymenko.
What makes Mawi heart patch different?
Traditionally, continuous heart monitoring was being performed with Holter monitors, which detect only 47% of arrhythmias—irregular heartbeats, have a bunch of wires connected to the patient’s body and take up to a month to retrieve results. Cardiologists had to wait for the monitors to come back from patients, sanitise them and maintain them between uses.
Cardiologists can bid goodbye to all of these with a Mawi heart patch. The patches are single-use, disposable and give real-time analysis. Cardiologists can run tests on several patients and monitor them in real-time on their devices without having to wait for the patients to return the monitor.
Also, the patch can be applied in less than a minute, reducing the time to diagnosis by 97%. Inbuilt with a two-channel detection, the Mawi patch overcomes the limitation of signal-to-noise to provide continuous uninterrupted data.
Mawi and its competition
While Mawi has an excellent product offering, it also has ever-growing competition.
Smartwatches like Withings ScanWatch are FDA-cleared as medical-grade devices for BP monitoring, and other smartwatches like Apple, Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung, etc., are all extensively investing in research and development for FDA clearance. All these have continuous heart monitoring in future plans. These can turn out to be a solid competition as they provide many more features alongside heart monitoring.
Several other ECG sensor patch manufacturing companies, like Vivalink, Nanosonic, Zio patch by iRhythm technologies, etc., are Mawi’s direct competitors.
With such a competitive health market segment, it’d be interesting to see how Mawi will bring innovation and stand out. What do you think? Let us know in the comment section.
About Mawi
Mawi is a US-based bootstrapped health-tech startup that creates wearable medical devices and technology to diagnose and monitor cardiac diseases. Founded in May 2017 by Andrew Klymenko, Artem Malynovskyi, Ron Fridman, and Vitalii Sahan, the startup is primarily concentrated in Europe, with teams spread across the globe, including the US.
Mawi aims to bring together advanced wearables and smart analytics software for better healthcare management. It also has clinically validated products like Mawi Vital, Mawi Band and Mawi BP watch that provide overall healthcare management. During the COVID breakout in 2020, they put in efforts to research and make artificial lung ventilators to save more people in cases of ventilator shortage.
