Marcos Chaparro

"The difference between a heart attack being serious or irreparable may reside in the diagnosis taking ten minutes to confirm instead of an hour. However, less than 30% of patients with acute chest pain actually suffer a severe cardiac pathology. Having a device that performs electrocardiograms on site, wherever the sick patient is located, and transmits the data obtained to the relevant physician would help to remove doubts in this narrow margin of time and save lives.

Young Marcos Chaparro, along with a team of students and researchers from the National University of the South and the National Technological University, has developed this device: the Electro-smart. At just seven inches tall by two inches wide, the Electro-smart captures all 12 channels within an ECG and displays the data instantaneously over the Internet, a mobile phone or a PC.

Chaparro is also the founder of Mrk Industries, the company responsible for the design and production of the Electro-smart hardware and the software embedded in it. This young innovator has reduced manufacturing costs of his prototypes to $100 dollars per unit, making this device adaptable to all types of markets, both in developed countries and in rural settings where the only requirement for use is internet access.

This electrocardiograph (ECG) could be used in other fields, like sports where it could help to prevent sudden deaths, or for at-home monitoring for sick or elderly people, or as part of the equipment set inside ambulances.

Electro-smart has begun clinical trials and Chaparro´s team presented their innovative results last month at the XXIV Inter-American Congress of Cardiology in Buenos Aires. Mrk Industries has partnered with the Argentinian medical equipment company Eccosur to market the Electro-smart."