Heart and Asthma Monitors? There’s an App for That<br />Dr. Bhatt, who is a scientific adviser to Eko and will be compensated with a small stock option for her work, said<br />that tracking patients, wherever they live, will allow cardiologists to intervene “before a crisis.”<br />Other doctors say that it is too soon to tell how helpful telemedicine devices — which include home monitoring devices for diabetes, asthma<br />and sleep disorders — will be, given the many obstacles.<br />Instead, Tyler Crouch, then a 21-year-old mechanical-engineering student, spent spring break<br />of 2013 building a digitized stethoscope and thinking, “This better be worth it.”<br />Since then, he and two classmates from the University of California, Berkeley, have formed a company — Eko Devices, which is based here — raised nearly $5 million<br />and sold 6,000 digital stethoscopes, used in 700 hospitals.<br />“Medicine is experiencing a potentially tectonic shift,” said Dr. Jeffrey Olgin, professor and chief of cardiology at the U. C.<br />San Francisco School of Medicine, who conducts research into mobile and digital health.<br />“There is a black space,” said Dr. Robert Pearl, a lecturer on health care policy at Stanford University’s medical<br />and business schools and, until recently, the chief executive of Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, which represents 10,000 physicians.<br />Over the next two years, the company will participate in two studies at U. C.<br />“If you compare Eko to Uber, it looks like we’re moving at a snail’s pace,” Mr. Bellet said.
