“Music as a conceptual and digital theranostic tool for cardiac electrophysiology” won the Best Innovations in AI and Digital Medicine in Clinical Electrophysiology Award delivered by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) of the European Society of Cardiology today at the EHRA 2026 at the Palais des Congrès at Porte Maillot, Paris !
The finalists’ presentations took place at 8:30am on the last day of the annual EHRA conference, which drew 7000 registrants. Watch the presentations at https://esc365.escardio.org/Ehra-congress/my-programme?v=S17128-best-innovations-in-ai-and-digital-medicine-in-clinical-ep (available to public until 30 April; only EHRA members thereafter).
The session featured other strong presentations from Edinburgh University’s open source EP Workbench project presented by Vinush Vigneswaran and University of Amsterdam’s real-time MRI-guided cardiac ablation presented by Michiel Kemme. The results were announced at the Closing Session which started at 2:25pm.
The jury members evaluated the applications using the following criteria:
• Relevance to clinical practice
• Degree of innovation of the concept or product
• Level of validation and accuracy
• Stage of development
• Size of field for innovation, estimated size of clinical benefit
• Scientific background and quality of the description
The distinguished jury members were
Sanjiv Narayan (Stanford University School of Medicine – Palo Alto, United States of America)
Jose Millet (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia – Valencia, Spain)
Jagmeet Singh (Massachusetts General Hospital – Boston, United States of America)
The session was chaired by
David Duncker (Hannover Heart Rhythm Center – Hannover, Germany)
Emma Svennberg (Karolinska Institute – Stockholm, Sweden)
The award was presented by
Helmut Puererfellner (Ordensklinikum Linz Elisabethinen – Linz, Austria), EHRA President 2024-2026
Stylianos Tzeis (Mitera Hospital – Athens, Greece), EHRA Scientific Programme Committee Chair 2026
Natasja de Groot (Erasmus University Medical Centre – Rotterdam, the Netherlands), Co-Chair 2026
Music as a conceptual and digital theranostic tool for cardiac electrophysiology
Abstract: Music is pervasive and widely loved. Remarkable similarities exist between music and heart rhythms, which can be exploited in electrophysiology education and research. Music has steerable effects on the autonomic nervous system, which can be harnessed in cardiovascular diagnostics and digital therapeutics. But music’s potential to advance electrophysiology has been limited by a lack of dedicated tools to capture, represent, and analyse co-occurring structures in music and physiologic signals. Here, we propose an approach that focusses on music expressivity—acoustic variations recognisable across genres. A web tool, CosmoNote, designed for presenting, hearing, and annotating music and physiologic signals shows mirrored structures in music and arrhythmias, and reveals connections between expressive music structures and autonomic response. A mobile and desktop visualisation app, HeartFM, enables collecting of concurrent music and physiologic data and live demonstrations of music-cardiovascular interactions. Interpretation Maps capture explanatory variables, expressive decisions and actions, from the source and contribute to music-based biomarkers to characterise music reactions and boost predictive models. With AI/statistics, these tools have yielded evidence that raised blood pressure limits music reactivity; music engagement augments cardiovascular differences, improving hypertension diagnosis; and baseline autonomic traits are linked to distinct music reaction patterns.
