Advances in cardiac devices and bioelectronics augmented with artificial intelligence

Stark, Charles
Rytkin, Eric
Mircea, Andrei Alexandru
Efimov, Igor R.

¹Department of Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston IL, USA
²Medical Scientist Training Program, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago IL, USA
³Department of Medicine (Cardiology), Northwestern University, Chicago IL, USA
Igor Efimov has held Professorships in Biomedical Engineering and Medicine (Division of Cardiology) at Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA since 2022. He is Editor-in-Chief, Cardiovascular Engineering & Technology. His research focuses on the physiological mechanisms of cardiovascular disease and on developing novel therapies for heart diseases, emphasizing heart rhythm disorders. Professor Efimov earned BSc/MSc/PhD degrees from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1992 and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Pittsburgh (1992–1994), subsequently holding positions at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (1994–2000), Case Western Reserve University (2000–2004) and Washington University. He was the founding chairman of the George Washington University's BME Department. He founded Cardialen to develop low-energy implantable electrotherapy for cardiac arrhythmias, which was acquired in 2022, and also co-founded NuSera Biosystems to develop new catheter technology for pacing, mapping, and ablating arrhythmias. He has received numerous awards and served on numerous editorial boards and international expert panels.

^*Corresponding author I. R. Efimov: Department of Medicine (Cardiology), Northwestern University, 303 E Superior St, SQBRC Building, Rm. 11–529, Chicago, IL 60611, USA. Email: [email protected]

Received February 04, 2025; Accepted June 30, 2025; previously published online July 22, 2025

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Handling Editors: Bjorn Knollmann & Axel Loewe

The peer review history is available in the Supporting Information section of this article (https://doi.org/10.1113/JP287135#support-information-section).

The Journal of Physiology Publish Ahead of Print, July 24, 2025. | DOI: 10.1113/JP287135

Diagnostic bioelectronics such as the electrocardiogram have become increasingly prevalent in the management of cardiovascular diseases like atrial fibrillation. While these devices provide meaningful clinical value, their complex and profuse data output requires considerable labour and training from clinicians to diagnose disease. This abundant production of complex data has made diagnostic bioelectronics a prime target for artificial intelligence (AI) integration. AI-integrated diagnostic bioelectronics have already left the clinic as widely prevalent wearable smartwatches equipped with single-lead electrocardiography sensors. Meanwhile, substantial innovation is also taking place at the intersection of other sensing modalities in the form of edge computing. Here, we overview the implementation and embedding of AI into diagnostic bioelectronics of multiple sensing modalities, including electrocardiography, photoplethysmography, echocardiography, and others, and discuss the recent advances made by medical device companies and researchers alike at the interface between the heart and AI.