Israeli Health Monitor Hopes To Spur Medical Innovation

When Eugene Jorov was 17, his father, who was just 40, had a fatal heart attack. That was the moment when Mr. Jorov knew what he wanted to do. A keen engineer, he wanted to use technology to stop people dying early like his father.

The Tel Aviv-based startup Angel is his answer.

“This is the culmination of everything,” he said. “To me it is personal.”

“We started out trying to build a product for heart-attack prediction, but we fast realized there was a problem—there was no sensor.” Angel is an open-source hardware wrist sensor that measures four things: heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen and activity. There are other health wristbands, but none are open-source.

Mr. Jorov, a 10-year veteran of the Israeli Defense Force, stressed that the sensor was not a medical product, but about health. It is about prevention. “We want to be able to detect that slight irregularity in your heart beat five years before it is a problem,” he said.