ATCOR, subsidiary of Australian fim CardieX recently signed a three-year deal with Chinese Andon. The goal -develop and market home monitoring devices containing ATCOR’s SphygmoCor technology.
SphygmoCor is crucial for CV disease management
SphygmoCor is ATCOR’s signature technology. It enables the measurement of patients’ central blood pressure and arterial stiffness. Thanks to proprietary algorithms, only a simple brachial cuff is necessary. The benefits are immense; central blood pressure (cBP) is predictive of the risk for major cardiovascular events such as stroke or heart infarctions. Indeed, many physicians advocate for using cBP as a target for antihypertensive treatment instead of the brachial BP used today. Arterial stiffness is another parameter that SphygmoCor-enabled devices measure that is increasingly important in everyday clinical scenarios.
ATCOR aims to take cBP from the doctor’s office to patients’ homes
In the current climate of COVID-19, patients and doctors alike are trying to limit their in-person meetings to the bare minimum. Thus, the more things doctors can do remotely, the better. Remote measurements of cBP is science fiction at this point. According to ATCOR’s plans, this bit of science fiction will become reality by Q4 2021. Pairing up with Andon is a brilliant move; the company has been in the business of designing and assembling home-monitoring devices for more than a decade.
The way ahead
At the time of writing, all we know about the home monitoring device is that it will be called ATCOR Pulse. According to both companies’ statements, the product will undergo a single-year development cycle. That might sound a little hastened, but we should keep in mind that ATCOR has a lot of experience in designing SphygmoCor products, while Andon has plenty of experience with home monitoring devices. Combining existing design ideas to create the ATCOR Pulse should be relatively faster than designing from the ground up, albeit harder. How will this innovative device turn out? Will physicians and patients actually see benefit from its use? As always, we’ll keep you up to date!