Meet the Cat Dad Turning Smartphones Into Stethoscopes

Dr. Roeland Decorte spent years at Cambridge decoding ancient languages. Now he’s using the same obsession with hidden patterns to tackle a very different mystery: what’s happening inside our pets’ hearts.

Dr. Roeland Decorte has made a career out of finding meaning in things other people can't easily understand. At the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD, that meant studying ancient writing systems and developing new approaches to deciphering scripts that have remained unread for thousands of years. He later taught Cambridge students how to look at mysterious symbols, recognize patterns, and slowly turn what appeared to be noise into information.

Today, the symbols have been replaced by heart sounds, and Decorte's most important audience may be considerably furrier. He is the founder of Sonus Health, a technology company developing an app that uses the microphone already inside a smartphone to capture and analyze heart sounds. The idea is surprisingly simple: instead of requiring another piece of specialized hardware, what if the phone nearly every pet owner already carries could become a tool for listening to a pet's heart?

And if you're wondering how someone goes from ancient languages to veterinary cardiology, Decorte would probably tell you the two worlds aren't as far apart as they appear.

From Ancient Codes to Heartbeats

Decorte's academic career was built around patterns. Ancient scripts contain information, but understanding that information requires figuring out which signals matter and what those signals mean. Heart sounds present a surprisingly similar challenge.

Every heartbeat contains information. Veterinarians have been extracting that information with stethoscopes for generations, listening for changes in rate, rhythm and sounds that could indicate something isn't quite right. But those few minutes in the examination room represent only a tiny snapshot of what is happening during the other 23 hours and 50-something minutes of the patient's day.

For Decorte, the question became whether technology could help capture more of those signals and make them useful. The idea was also personal. After a serious cardiac condition in his own family went undetected for years, he became interested in how much potentially useful medical information might be hiding inside the sounds bodies produce. That eventually became Sonus Health.

The Stethoscope Is Already in Your Pocket

Sonus is built around an intriguing premise: a smartphone already contains an extremely sophisticated microphone, processor and computing platform. Maybe you don't need to build another expensive piece of hardware around it.

Using the app, a phone can be placed against a dog or cat's chest to capture a heart recording. Sonus then uses technology developed with board certified veterinary cardiology input to analyze that recording and provide information including heart rate and heart rate variability, while helping identify potential abnormalities that may deserve closer attention. The goal isn't to turn pet owners into cardiologists or replace the veterinarian's stethoscope. It's to give veterinarians something they've historically had very little access to: objective information collected while the patient is at home.That's particularly interesting in veterinary medicine because our patients can't tell us that something feels different. They also have an irritating habit of behaving completely differently the moment they enter a veterinary hospital.

And Then There Is Eowyn

Of course, no story about Decorte's move into animal health would be complete without Eowyn, his orange Siberian cat.

Named after the shieldmaiden from The Lord of the Rings, Eowyn is a fitting companion for someone who spent years immersed in ancient languages and the world of historical texts. She's also a pretty good example of why at-home cardiac technology could be useful.

Cats are masters at hiding disease.

A cat can look perfectly normal at home while significant disease is developing underneath the surface. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, is the most commonly diagnosed cardiac disease in cats, and some affected cats may show few obvious outward signs, particularly early in the disease process.

Then there's the veterinary visit itself.

Anyone who practices feline medicine knows what can happen after the carrier comes out. The cat who was peacefully sleeping in a sunbeam 20 minutes earlier arrives at the hospital with an elevated heart rate, a generous dose of adrenaline and very strong opinions about everyone involved.That doesn't make an in-clinic examination less important. It does mean the information collected at home may provide another useful piece of the clinical picture.

For Decorte, who is very much a devoted cat dad, building technology that lets animals be monitored without automatically putting them through another stressful trip to the clinic has obvious appeal.

What Happens When the Exam Room Extends Into the Living Room?

That's where Sonus becomes especially interesting for veterinarians. A veterinarian may hear something questionable during an examination and want to know whether it persists. A patient with known cardiac disease may need monitoring between visits. A dog could have an unusual rhythm that appears intermittently. A telemedicine provider may need objective information that can't be obtained through a video call alone.

Traditionally, those situations can mean another appointment, additional diagnostic equipment or referral for more advanced cardiac evaluation. Home recordings potentially add another option.Instead of relying entirely on what happened during one appointment, a veterinarian could have access to recordings made while the patient is relaxed at home. Repeated measurements could also provide context that a single snapshot can't.

And when a recording raises concern, the next step isn't asking AI to practice veterinary medicine on its own. The technology can help veterinary professionals decide when additional evaluation is warranted.Sonus also offers a pathway for recordings to be reviewed by board certified veterinary cardiologists, giving general practitioners another way to bring specialty expertise into a case and determine whether a patient should continue to be monitored, undergo additional diagnostics or be referred. That makes the technology less about replacing anything veterinarians already do and more about filling in the enormous gaps between veterinary visits.

Cats May Be the Perfect Test Case

Veterinary medicine talks constantly about early detection, but early detection only works when someone is actually looking.That can be especially difficult with feline cardiac disease. Cats aren't necessarily visiting a veterinarian as frequently as dogs, subtle changes can be difficult for owners to recognize, and even when a murmur or other abnormality is detected, determining what it means may require additional diagnostics.

A tool that makes repeated listening possible at home could potentially change that conversation.It could also give veterinarians another reason to engage owners in preventive care. Instead of telling someone to simply “watch for changes,” the veterinary team may eventually be able to give that owner a more active role in monitoring the patient and collecting information that can be shared back with the practice.

For cats like Eowyn, the best part may be that none of this requires leaving the couch.

A Different Kind of Veterinary AI

Artificial intelligence is moving into veterinary medicine quickly, from radiology and pathology to medical records, diagnostics and predictive analytics. Some of those applications require veterinary teams to dramatically change their workflows or invest in entirely new equipment.

Sonus is taking another route.The hardware is already sitting in someone's pocket.That could be particularly meaningful for telemedicine, general practices and pet owners who might not otherwise have easy access to cardiac monitoring. It also reflects a larger change happening in veterinary technology: the examination room is no longer necessarily the only place where meaningful clinical information can be collected. Wearables, connected devices, home diagnostics and smartphone-based tools are beginning to create a much longer view of the patient. For veterinarians, the opportunity is not simply more data. It's better context.

The Codebreaker Found a New Language

There is something wonderfully appropriate about Decorte's career taking this turn. He spent years trying to understand civilizations through the traces they left behind, looking for patterns hidden inside languages most of the world could no longer read. Now he's applying that same curiosity to a language veterinarians have been listening to for centuries.

Lub. Dub. Lub. Dub.

Except this time, the goal isn't understanding the past.

It's catching something early enough to change the future.

And somewhere in the middle of all that technology is Eowyn, the orange Siberian who gets to live with a Cambridge-trained codebreaker who decided that one of the world's most interesting undeciphered languages might have been purring next to him all along.

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