Anika Begay
Roeland Decorte has grown up in a nursing home in Belgium, where he learned to spot the early, subtle signs of mental decline in small changes in the way residents walked or talked. When Decorte was 11, his father, the owner and manager of the nursing home, began waking up 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 their stethoscopes and diagnosed him with anxiety. But the symptoms persisted, and it wasn’t until 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 it hadn’t been noticed, it would have killed him: he was 39.
With disaster averted, the young Decorte was able to concentrate on his studies and by the age of 17 was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, the youngest Belgian ever to attend the prestigious college. (This caused some logistical problems: his tutor had to become his legal guardian, and a new payment system had to be put in place at the college bar to prevent him from buying alcohol like his peers.)
He spent the next seven years specialising in cracking ancient codes, with a cushy career in academia (or a more exciting one as an Indiana Jones-style relic hunter) beckoning. But Decorte never stopped thinking about what had happened to his father and how he could 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 education can provide, the then 27-year-old Decorte founded a company and turned his attention to cracking a different ancient code: the secret rhythm of the heart.
AI is booming in healthcare, and the only thing holding it back is a lack of data. Meanwhile, doctors, pressed for time, can only gather information sporadically. Wearable devices like smartwatches might be able to take your pulse, but they’re poor at more specific diagnoses (partly because your pulse is about as far away from the truly vital organs as you can get).
Decorte wanted to develop a piece of technology that could continuously and precisely monitor the body, so that people like his father could get the care they needed more quickly. He started by trying to build sensors into clothes so that people could monitor their vital signs without a doctor’s visit. Then he designed an elaborate exoskeleton packed with sensors to measure all sorts of ailments. That attracted some military interest, but it wouldn’t have been much help to someone like Decorte’s father. “I was very naive,” he said when we met recently in the wood-paneled basement of a cheap café in Mayfair, London. “There were about two full-time years of me working in the spare room of my house and doing nothing else.” But the problem he kept running into was noise: unless you could build a contraption that pressed each sensor directly against your skin, there was too much random interference from people moving about in the world to have a good idea of what was actually happening in your body.
