To use the device, patients place two fingers on the back of AliveCor’s iPhone case and rest them on the large electrodes. The case can also be pressed directly against a patient’s chest for ECG, or electro-cardigram monitoring, purposes. Data from the electrodes wirelessly passed from the case to the iPhone, where it can be analyzed or send to the cloud for storage. The case runs on its own coin-cell battery, which is good enough for an estimated 12,000 scans at 30 seconds in length.

While the case and supporting app won’t analyze the data — that’s for an actual medical professional to; at least for now — the idea of putting the data in the cloud is intriguing. A doctor could remotely view the data for analysis, for example. Or, if the device were actually sold directly to consumers, a doctor’s visit could done virtually: The patient could use their own AliveCor case and iPhone to send heart rate data to a local physician at regular intervals.

AliveCor was mentioned as an enabler of such tech when we noted last year that healthcare is a perfect area to benefit from big data in the cloud. Sensors with web connectivity can create a massive view of different health metrics, helping doctors, medical insurance companies and researchers analyze for patterns that could benefit the health care industry as a whole.

What’s next in this area of health monitoring meshed with smartphones? A Star Trek tricorder of sorts. The Scanadu Scout doesn’t have FDA approval like the AliveCor case does, but it sounds promising. The small device measures heart rate, level of oxygen in your blood, pulse and body temperature to work with a smartphone and actually diagnose more than a dozen health issues.

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Fast Company’s Co.exist blog has the details of the project, which hopes to understand what the heart rhythms of an entire population look like over a period of days, weeks and maybe even years. So while doctors today might get a few moments of a normal heart rate from patients in their office, most continuous monitoring occurs only when a patient is in the hospital and experiencing distress — like a heart attack. Using medical devices such as the AliveCor EKG reader that acts as an iPhone case, an app, or even some of the hoped-for wearable tracking sensors, such as the theoretical wearable thin-film patch from mc10, doctors can get a more well-rounded view of what a healthy heart looks like.

From there, it’s only a matter of establishing patterns and teasing out data points. Then perhaps, doctors can discover how heart rates change ahead of heart attacks, before someone comes down with a serious illness or any other number of indications that a person is less than their best. It’s the type of project that Seton Healthcare, an Austin, Texas hospital system could embrace to discover population health trends and lower the cost of delivering medical care by finding small problems before they become big ones.

Healthcare is the type of use case that big data is made for. And plenty of efforts are being made to find ways to make this type of aggregated and constant data sharing acceptable for consumers. We have devices that can do it. Now we need the subjects. Then Dr. Saxon and her colleagues will have to find ways to analyze the data for useful patterns that benefit everyone. So open your heart, and get involved.

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