HOW TO AVOID NO.1 CAUSE OF DEATH: HEART HEALTH INNOVATIONS
NORMUNDS DAUDISS
Normunds Daudiss (@upolife) is passionate about innovations and sees a big impact combining the value of technology & healthcare. He is always on the lookout for new disruptive stuff, at the same time creating one himself.
The company he joined and invested in, UPOlife, is developing algorithm-based solutions addressing the number one cause of death in the world - Heart diseases. More than 300 000 people's heart health states analyzed, tens of lives saved. Normunds is on a mission to help save 1 million lives
Normunds Daudiss discusses how to avoid the number one cause of death
You change your life by changing your heart, but I would like to rephrase that: you change your life by getting to know your heart.
Summary
- Heart disease causes 37.1% of European deaths, but 80% are preventable with early detection, yet 90% of patients seek medical attention too late due to a lack of risk awareness. - While heart risks increase significantly after age 60, screenings have found abnormalities in 10% of children, proving that heart health awareness is crucial across all age groups. - Healthcare is shifting toward telemedicine and remote self-monitoring to manage chronic conditions, utilizing machine learning algorithms to provide patients with safety and constant oversight. - Small, portable ECG devices are now recognized by guidelines as effective for diagnosing atrial fibrillation, a leading cause of stroke that often goes undetected in hundreds of thousands. - Remote checkup innovations, like the Apolife Healthcare Assessment patch, allow for multi-day heart monitoring at home, making annual heart health screenings more affordable and accessible.
Article
Heart Health Innovations Promised A New Front In The Fight Against Europe’s Biggest Killer
At Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki, Normunds Daudiss Argued That Remote Monitoring, Machine Learning And Affordable Screening Could Shift Cardiac Care From Late Rescue To Early Prevention
Heart disease remained the leading cause of death across Europe, yet much of its toll could still be avoided. That was the central message of Normunds Daudiss at Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki, where he delivered a presentation titled *How To Avoid No.1 Cause Of Death: Heart Health Innovations* on 16 October 2020 in Helsinki, Finland.
Daudiss, an investor and advocate for healthcare technology through UPOlife, framed the crisis in stark terms. Cardiovascular conditions, he said, accounted for 37.1% of deaths in Europe. But the most arresting figure was also the most hopeful: 80% of those conditions could be prevented if they were identified and acted upon early enough.
“Eighty percent of heart health conditions could be prevented if we knew and acted upon them at the right time,” Daudiss said.
The Tragedy Of Delay
The most dangerous feature of heart disease, as Daudiss described it, was not only its prevalence but its invisibility. Too many people, he warned, did not know their current heart health status, did not understand their risks, and did not seek help until it was too late.
According to statistics he cited from doctors, 90% of patients arrived for treatment too late for the best possible intervention. In that gap between risk and recognition lay the real crisis: not simply disease itself, but a healthcare culture still built around reaction rather than anticipation.
The pandemic sharpened that problem. In isolation, many people had even fewer opportunities to seek proper medical assessment. A condition that might once have been caught in a clinic could now pass unnoticed at home.
Daudiss’s argument was clear. Prevention depended not only on healthier living, but on knowledge. People needed to know their hearts before their hearts failed them.
A Risk That Did Not Belong Only To The Elderly
There was no doubt, he said, that heart risk rose dramatically with age, particularly after 60. But he resisted the comfortable fiction that cardiac screening belonged only to older people.
He pointed to a small screening study in Latvia involving children over the age of 12. Abnormalities were found in 10% of those screened, and in 1.3% of cases the team identified syndromes previously unknown to the patient, parents and doctors.
The figures did not amount to panic. But they did challenge complacency. Heart risk, Daudiss suggested, was not a distant concern that arrived only in old age. It was something that could remain hidden for years, across age groups, until technology or testing brought it to light.
A Personal Loss Behind The Mission
Part of the power of Daudiss’s presentation came from its personal undercurrent. He spoke of his father, who once believed he would die at 45 because his own father had died at that age and an astrologist had foretold the same fate. He did not die that year. He lived another 19 years. But he later died with a heart condition, short of average life expectancy.
Doctors told Daudiss that his father had already been living with a serious heart condition for six months before his death, with part of the heart not functioning properly. The implication was painful and simple: if the condition had been known earlier, intervention might have been possible.
That story formed the emotional hinge of the talk. It was not merely a pitch for innovation. It was an argument born from the familiar grief of discovering too late what medicine might have caught sooner.
The Silent Stroke Trigger
Daudiss devoted particular attention to atrial fibrillation, which he described as a silent killer and a major cause of stroke. Its danger lay partly in its stealth. Large numbers of people were living with it without any diagnosis at all.
In the UK alone, he said, around half a million people were walking around with atrial fibrillation unknowingly. Scandinavia, including Finland, sat in what he called a red zone of high prevalence, and the projected increase in cases over coming years was estimated at 45%.
This was not an abstract forecast. It was a warning about a swelling burden of preventable harm, particularly in places already under strain. Stroke often appeared as the first unmistakable sign that something had gone terribly wrong. By then, the opportunity for easy prevention had already passed.
The Rise Of The Portable ECG
What made Daudiss’s talk more than another cautionary lecture was his insistence that tools already existed to change the picture.
He described a project in Latvia that equipped family doctors with small, portable ECG devices. Hundreds of patients were being screened daily, and several arrhythmias had already been found. The devices, he said, were not merely convenient gadgets. Under European Society of Cardiology guidelines, such handheld tools could be used for proper diagnostics in many cases, removing the need for a traditional 12-lead hospital ECG.
That shift mattered because it cut directly at the barriers that kept people from screening: cost, access, time and geography. A test that could fit into a hand could also fit into daily life.
“This is the way how we can change and adjust the future of healthcare of the heart health,” Daudiss said.
Telemedicine As Reassurance, Not Just Efficiency
If diagnosis was one frontier, follow-up was another. Daudiss argued that the future of heart care, especially for chronic patients, depended on remote self-monitoring backed by automated analytics.
He spoke about the psychological burden carried by those already diagnosed with heart conditions. For them, the need was not simply clinical supervision, but reassurance.
“The number one thing that a patient needs is to feel safe, knowing that someone is watching over them,” he said.
That was where machine learning and telemedicine entered the frame. Automated data analysis, adjusted to each individual, could help doctors identify which patients needed urgent attention while allowing others to remain safely at home. In a strained healthcare system, this promised not only convenience but continuity.
The Apolife Patch And The New Logic Of Screening
Among the innovations highlighted at Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki was the Apolife Healthcare Assessment patch, a remote heart checkup tool designed for multi-day use at home. Patients could receive the patch by post, place it on their chest, wear it for three to five days, and return it for automated data analysis and cardiologist review.
The design was almost deceptively simple. Yet its significance lay in what it represented: the relocation of heart screening from specialist settings into ordinary life.
Daudiss suggested that for some age groups, regular heart checks should be close to mandatory, and he advocated yearly screening as a practical norm. The case he made was not for panic-driven monitoring, but for routine awareness. To know one’s current heart health, in his telling, was to reclaim time, options and agency.
“We are making history with heart health solutions that offer affordable and accessible care for everyone,” he said.
A Paradigm Shift In Healthcare
Beneath the devices and data, Daudiss was making a broader claim about medicine itself. Healthcare, he said, had reached a tipping point. Existing systems could not manage the scale of chronic disease without health technologies. Telemedicine was no longer an adjunct to care. It was becoming part of the structure of care.
“By combining technology opportunities with proper healthcare knowledge, we can really make the future together,” he said.
He presented this transformation not as a distant possibility but as an active historical shift already underway. The old model, in which hospitals remained the central gatekeepers of diagnosis and monitoring, was being challenged by lighter, cheaper and more responsive tools. What mattered now was whether institutions and individuals would trust them enough to act early.
Knowing The Heart Before It Breaks
By the end of the session, Daudiss had moved from statistics to a kind of moral appeal. People were used to being told to change their lives by changing their habits. His reformulation was simpler and more urgent: change your life by getting to know your heart.
It was a striking conclusion because it captured the logic of the whole talk. The challenge was not only to invent smarter technologies, but to build a culture in which people used them before symptoms turned catastrophic.
“We can change and adjust the future of heart health by embracing the paradigm shift toward health technologies,” Daudiss said.
At Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki, his message was less about futurism than about timing. Heart disease was still the number one cause of death. But in the quiet spread of remote monitoring, portable ECGs and algorithmic screening, there was the outline of a different future, one in which the deadliest conditions might no longer arrive as a surprise.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2020 Helsinki