Lub Dub Lab
“Follow your voice”
Introduction
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, claiming close to 20 million lives each year—disproportionately affecting low- and middle-income countries. Early-stage heart disease often progresses silently, with symptoms appearing only after significant and sometimes irreversible damage has occurred. Across much of the world, access to timely and reliable screening remains limited, leaving millions undiagnosed until acute events force care.
India illustrates the scale of this challenge. Heart disease accounts for 26% of all deaths, and more than 600 million people lack access to reliable diagnostic tools.
Similar barriers — high costs, hospital dependence, shortages of trained specialists, and long travel distances — exist across many regions globally. To prevent avoidable deaths and disability, heart disease screening and monitoring must move beyond hospitals and reach people earlier, where they live.
Problem
Current heart disease screening and monitoring tools—such as EKGs and echocardiograms—are expensive, hospital-based, and dependent on trained specialists. As a result, timely screening is inaccessible for large populations, particularly in rural and semi-urban settings. Long travel distances, high out-of-pocket costs, fear of hospitals, and severe provider shortages delay or prevent diagnosis altogether.
The healthcare system is structurally designed to detect heart disease late, after symptoms become severe. This creates a critical gap for a low-cost, non-invasive, and scalable screening and monitoring platform that can identify heart disease risk early—before deterioration leads to emergency care, hospitalization, or death.
Opportunity
Lub Dub Lab explores the use of the human voice as a novel modality for heart disease screening and monitoring, at the intersection of machine learning, clinical workflows, and healthcare delivery. Studies have shown that vocal biomarkers are associated with a 2.6× higher risk of major cardiac events and can detect conditions such as hypertension with ~80% accuracy using as little as 30 seconds of speech.
Our approach is low-cost, non-invasive, and scalable. Leveraging ubiquitous smart devices, Lub Dub Lab enables accessible screening and monitoring without hospitals, specialized equipment, or trained specialists—making early detection feasible across diverse care settings.
We are initially focused on heart failure, where early signs of clinical worsening are often missed between visits. Voice-based analysis is combined with existing data sources—such as weight, blood pressure, and wearable metrics—to build a multi-modal platform that integrates into existing clinical workflows. Over time, the platform is designed to expand to other heart disease indications and ultimately establish the human voice as a standalone, scalable assessment tool across multiple conditions.
By transforming everyday speech into a continuous health signal, Lub Dub Lab aims to shift care from reactive intervention to proactive prevention—making early detection more accessible, timely, and equitable. Together, we can make healthcare a right—not a privilege.