STEM for BRITAIN is a scientific poster competition and exhibition held annually in Parliament since 1997, organised by the Parliamentary & Scientific Committee. Its aim is to give members of both Houses of Parliament an insight into the outstanding research work being undertaken in UK universities by early-career researchers. Prizes are awarded for the posters presented in each discipline which best communicated high level science, engineering or mathematics to a lay audience.
Senior Research Associate Dr Xiao Gu presented the poster ‘Sensing Cardiac Health Across Devices and Scenarios: A Foundation Model Bridging Clinics and Wearables’. Heart disease is the leading cause of death, yet many people lack access to consistent monitoring. Xiao Gu and colleagues developed a new kind of artificial intelligence, a foundation model for heart health, similar to how language models like ChatGPT learn from text. This one learns from 1.7 million heart signals, including data from hospital machines (like ECGs) and wearables (like smartwatches). It understands core patterns across devices, settings, and patient groups, helping doctors detect heart problems earlier and more fairly.
The model was evaluated on a broad range of clinical tasks: identifying various heart diseases, estimating patient traits like age or blood pressure from signals, predicting outcomes, and even answering diagnostic questions based on an ECG strip. In all cases, the foundation model matched or outperformed specialized models that were each trained on just one task. This breakthrough could bring reliable heart monitoring to more people, including those in remote or under-served communities. Dr Gu is a Senior Research Associate at the Computational Health Informatics (CHI) Lab led by Professor David Clifton.
