Connor Landgraf (MEng ’14), CEO of Eko Devices, created his startup while taking the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (CET)’s IEOR 190E (Mobile Apps) course and now a student in the Master of Engineering program, Landgraf is part of a capstone team that is working to commercialize the technology. His current MEng capstone project advisor is Ikhlaq Sidhu, the founding Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology as well as founding Chief Scientist of UC Berkeley’s Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership.
Taken from the Daily Californian
When Eko Devices’ CEO, Connor Landgraf, was tasked with finding and solving a modern-day medical problem in his senior thesis class, he took his work straight to the marketplace rather than limiting it to a grade on an assignment. Mere months after the class ended, the company launched with designs to incorporate modern technology into standard medical procedures.
Thus, the company’s venture was born: improving the accuracy of monitoring heart conditions by modifying an established, 200-year-old technology — the analog stethoscope.
According to Landgraf — a former ASUC president and one of the six UC Berkeley students behind the company’s creation — four out of every five new doctors are unable to detect and diagnose common heart problems with today’s stethoscope.
“The result is a huge number of individuals with heart conditions are misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all, and health care practitioners are referring far too many people to cardiologists unnecessarily,” Landgraf said.
To remedy this inevitable human limitation to detect faint heart murmurs, the company has created a “stethoscope attachment,” a microphone device that attaches to a doctor’s stethoscope to amplify and digitally capture the sounds of a patient’s heart.
The device then uses bluetooth technology to relay the recorded information to a smartphone, from which the recording can be replayed or sent to another physician for feedback on whether an abnormality is present.