Meet the Man 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 built a career around finding meaning in things most 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 had remained unread for thousands of years. He later taught Cambridge students how to look at mysterious symbols, recognize patterns, separate meaningful signals from noise, and slowly turn the seemingly indecipherable into information.

Today, the symbols have been replaced by heart sounds, and Decorte’s audience is considerably furrier. He is the founder of Sonus Health, a technology company developing a platform that uses the microphone already inside a smartphone to capture and analyze heart sounds. The premise sounds almost too simple: instead of asking veterinarians or pet owners to buy another piece of specialized hardware, what if the phone nearly everyone already carries could become a tool for listening to a pet’s heart? And if going from ancient languages to veterinary cardiology sounds like an unusual career pivot, Decorte might argue that the two worlds aren’t nearly as different as they first 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, how they relate to one another, and what they ultimately mean. Heart sounds present a surprisingly similar challenge. Every heartbeat contains information, and veterinarians have been extracting it with stethoscopes for generations, listening for changes in rate, rhythm, and sounds that could suggest something isn’t quite right.

The problem is that veterinary auscultation usually happens for only a few minutes at a time. A veterinarian listens during an examination, makes an assessment, and the patient goes home. Those few minutes represent only a tiny snapshot of what the heart is doing during the hundreds or thousands of hours between veterinary visits.

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

The Stethoscope May Already Be in Your Pocket

Sonus is built around an intriguing idea: modern smartphones already contain remarkably sophisticated microphones, processors, and computing power. Maybe cardiac monitoring doesn’t always require building another expensive piece of hardware around them.

Using Sonus, a smartphone can be placed against a dog or cat’s chest to capture a heart recording. The platform analyzes the recording and provides information including heart rate, heart rate variability, and rhythm, while helping identify potential abnormalities that may deserve closer attention. Recordings can also be escalated for review by a board-certified veterinary cardiologist. The goal isn’t to turn pet owners into cardiologists or replace the veterinarian’s stethoscope. It’s to give veterinary professionals something they have historically had very little access to: objective cardiac information collected while the patient is at home.

That distinction is 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. The heart rate recorded in an exam room with barking dogs, unfamiliar smells, and strangers in scrubs may not tell exactly the same story as the heart rate recorded while the patient is asleep on the couch.

And Then There Is Eowyn

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 seems like an appropriately literary companion for someone who spent years immersed in ancient languages and historical texts. She is also a pretty good example of why Decorte finds at-home cardiac monitoring so compelling.

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

Then there’s the veterinary visit itself. Anyone who practices feline medicine knows what can happen the moment the carrier comes out. The cat who was peacefully sleeping in a sunbeam 20 minutes earlier can arrive at the hospital with an elevated heart rate, a generous dose of adrenaline, and very strong opinions about everyone involved.

None of that makes an in-clinic examination less important. It does, however, make information collected while the cat is relaxed at home potentially valuable. For Decorte, who is very much a devoted cat dad, there is an obvious appeal to building technology that can collect information without automatically putting the patient through another stressful trip to the clinic.

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

This is where the concept becomes particularly 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 simply can’t be obtained through a conversation and video feed alone.

Traditionally, those situations may 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 examination, a veterinarian could have access to recordings made while the patient is relaxed in its normal environment. Repeated measurements could begin to create a timeline rather than another isolated snapshot.

When a recording raises concern, the next step isn’t asking artificial intelligence to practice veterinary medicine on its own. Sonus also provides a pathway for recordings to be reviewed by board-certified veterinary cardiologists, allowing general practitioners to bring specialty expertise into a case and help determine whether a patient should continue to be monitored, undergo additional diagnostics, or be referred.

That makes the technology less about replacing something veterinarians already do and more about filling in the enormous blank spaces 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 particularly challenging with feline cardiac disease. Cats may not visit veterinarians as frequently as dogs, subtle changes can be difficult for owners to recognize, and even when a murmur or other abnormality is detected, determining its significance may require additional diagnostics.

Repeated at-home listening could potentially change that conversation. Instead of telling an owner to simply “watch for changes,” the veterinary team could give that owner a more active role in monitoring the patient and collecting information that can be shared back with the practice. It doesn’t replace an echocardiogram. It doesn’t diagnose HCM from the living room. And it doesn’t eliminate the need for a veterinarian to examine the patient. What it potentially does is create another opportunity to notice that something has changed and decide whether it deserves a closer look. For cats like Eowyn, the best part may be that none of it requires leaving the couch.

A Different Kind of Veterinary AI

Artificial intelligence is moving quickly into veterinary medicine, 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 a different route. The hardware is already sitting in someone’s pocket. That could be particularly meaningful for general practices, telemedicine providers, and pet owners who may not otherwise have easy access to cardiac monitoring. It also reflects a much 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. Instead of having information from one Tuesday afternoon veterinary appointment, clinicians may increasingly be able to see what happened before that visit, what happened afterward, and whether something is changing over time. For veterinarians, the opportunity isn’t 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 recognizing something early enough to potentially 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 discovered that one of the world’s most interesting languages may have been purring next to him all along.

Want to Hear It for Yourself?

Hearing is believing! Veterinary clinics can try Sonus Health with a free 7-day trial and see how smartphone-based cardiac monitoring could fit into their own patients and workflow. Start your free 7-day Sonus Health trial.