A team of researchers in the UK say their AI-powered stethoscope can detect three different heart conditions in just 15 seconds.

It’s also, they readily admit, horrendously inaccurate.

Placed over the chest, the “smart” gizmo analyzes the rhythms of the heartbeat and blood flow that’re undetectable to the human ear, while also performing a quick electrocardiogram, or ECG, which is a test that gauges your heart’s electrical activity.

Then, all that info is packaged and sent “securely” to the cloud, where it gets analyzed by AI algorithms. However many heartbeats later, a test result is sent to your doctor’s smartphone.

Its creators, a team of researchers at Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, say that this could save lives by detecting heart conditions early on before they worsen — but the accuracy results make it feel like yet another example of dubious AI tech being stuffed into medical applications.

“This is an elegant example of how the humble stethoscope, invented more than 200 years ago, can be upgraded for the 21st century,” Sonya Babu-Narayan, clinical director at the British Heart Foundation which funded the research, said in a statement.

“We need innovations like these, providing early detection of heart failure, because so often this condition is only diagnosed at an advanced stage when patients attend hospital as an emergency,” she continued. “Given an earlier diagnosis, people can access the treatment they need to help them live well for longer.” 

In a new study published in the journal BMJ Open of more than 12,000 patients across the UK, the researchers found that patients examined by the AI stethoscopes were — when compared with another cohort who weren’t examined with the tech — 2.33 times more likely to be diagnosed with heart failure, meaning the heart isn’t pumping blood properly, and 3.45 times more likely to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, or an irregular heartbeat in the organ’s upper chambers. They were also nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with heart valve disease in the next 12 months.

In other words, it sounds like everyone and their mother is a walking cardiac time-bomb. Or maybe not. It turns out that an incredible two-thirds of the participants that the AI stethoscope said had heart failure didn’t actually have heart failure, after they were subjected to followup testing. Whoops.

That’s a pretty significant drawback, and the researchers acknowledge that this could result in creating some “unnecessary anxiety” for the unwitting patients told they have a failing heart when it’s, in reality, quite healthy. This shouldn’t be waved aside as an inevitable hapless error — you’re seriously toying with people’s sense of impending mortality here.

In the researcher’s defense, they stress that the AI stethoscope should only be used to check people who’re already suspected to have heart problems, and not routinely on healthy people.

But what feels most damning of all comes from the docs that used the device first-hand. A whopping 70 percent of the doctor’s offices either straight up stopped using the AI stethoscope or barely used it at all after 12 months. A hit among Britain’s white coats, it is not.

This might indicate that medical practitioners don’t find the gadget all that useful, but the researchers take a different view: the docs just haven’t learned to appreciate all its amazing quirks yet, and efforts need to be taken to integrate the device into their existing routines.

No matter. The creators are already planning to deploy their device to more practices across the UK.

“Importantly, this technology is already available to some patients and being widely used in GP surgeries,” study coauthor Nicholas Peters, a cardiologist at Imperial, said in the statement.

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