Validation and Implementation of a Wearable Cardiac Arrest Detection System in Clinical and Community Settings

Sudden cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death in Canada, often resulting in death within minutes if not treated. Quick recognition is crucial, but many incidents occur when no one is around to help. Our research aims to change this by using common consumer wearable devices, like smartwatches, to detect and predict cardiac arrest. Currently, smartwatches are unable to do this in a reliable way because these algorithms are not trained and tested on real cardiac arrest cases. We have collected this type of data from patients in hospices, undergoing medically assisted dying, and dying in the intensive care unit and trained highly accurate algorithms to detect cardiac arrest. In this project I will build an end to end cardiac arrest detection and alerting system which can use this algorithm to detect cardiac arrest, and complete the necessary steps to integrate it into the 9-1-1 system, building a foundation for real world community testing.
Our goal is to harness everyday wearable technology to improve the detection of cardiac arrest, enhancing survival rates and improving patient outcomes.