Afnan Tariq discusses how consumer wearables and AI can help manage heart failure

New early clinical data from a study using artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor widely available consumer wearables may help transform how heart failure patients are monitored and managed outside the hospital.

At the THT 2026 meeting in Boston, Afnan Tariq, MD, JD, an interventional cardiologist and assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, Irvine, presented first-in-man results from a passive, device-agnostic AI platform designed to turn data from consumer wearables into actionable clinical insights. The technology was able to lower the number of hospitalizations required over time thanks to earlier interventions. 

Tariq spoke with Cardiovascular Business about the study as well as other issues in heart failure management AI may be able to solve.

“The idea of disseminating technology to people who are so busy with day-to-day work is an important task,” Tariq said, describing the motivation behind the platform. “Technology has abounded in consumer's hands and it is everywhere. We as cardiologists—as physicians, frankly—struggled to keep up with that demand or really understand it.”