Each year, about 60,000 Canadians experience out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, with only 1 in 10 people surviving without immediate help. A new project by Advancing Health trainee, Dr. Jacob Hutton, seeks to bring the numbers down.
Over the past decade, smart wearables have evolved to monitor our fitness levels and offer baseline data on heart rate, sleep, and oxygen levels. What if these devices could be further optimized to detect sudden cardiac arrests and send alert notifications that could potentially save lives?
Dr. Jacob Hutton has been developing a cardiac arrest detection and alert system for consumer wearables such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, and was recently announced as the recipient of a 2025 Michael Smith Health Research Trainee Award. With Advancing Health as the partner organization, this award will support his project, ‘Validation and Implementation of a Wearable Cardiac Arrest Detection System in Clinical and Community Settings.’
We spoke with Dr. Hutton to discuss what the award means for him and his project, his journey as a scientist, and to learn more about the exciting developments he has underway.
From lifeguarding to safeguarding lives
Reflecting on his research journey so far, Dr. Hutton traces it to his career in emergency response and first aid, starting as a lifeguard in high school, then working in ski patrol, and most recently, as a paramedic with BC Emergency Health Services.
He credited working as a paramedic as pivotal in sparking his interest in cardiac arrest and resuscitation research. “As paramedics, we encounter many health concerns, with cardiac arrest being the most severe,” he said.
“So, that’s where I first became interested in cardiac arrest research,” Hutton added. “Then I began volunteering for the Paramedic Research Committee with the Ambulance Service in British Columbia, which eventually led me to go back to school for my Master’s and PhD at UBC.”
Reforming the algorithm
Sudden cardiac arrest refers to the sudden loss of all heart activity due to an irregular heart rhythm and is a leading cause of death in Canada, often resulting in death within minutes if treatment is delayed, making speedy recognition key to saving lives. But many incidents occur when no one is around to help.
Supervised by Advancing Health Scientist Dr. Brian Grunau, Dr. Hutton’s research seeks to remedy this by equipping common consumer wearable devices, such as smartwatches made by companies like Apple, Garmin, and Fitbit, with an end-to-end cardiac arrest detection and alerting system that can also be integrated into the 9-1-1 system.
Current wearable devices can detect atrial fibrillation, also known as irregular heart rhythm, but are not calibrated to detect cardiac arrest. This is because most detection systems require user initiation (the user needs to sound the alarm), which is not possible during cardiac arrest since the patient is unconscious. Currently, automatic alerts are also often considered unreliable because their algorithms haven’t been trained and tested on real incidents of cardiac arrest.
To remedy this, Dr. Hutton and his team have been collecting this type of data from patients in hospices and in ICUs, and have trained highly accurate algorithms to detect cardiac arrest.
More funding, collaborations, and impact
The Michael Smith Health Research Trainee award is a significant one for Dr. Hutton, as it will enable him to conduct his research with stability. “The award is a three-year salary award,” he said. “It gives me stability over a longer period to pursue my mid- and long-term research goals. It essentially gives me a financial runway for projects that might take some time to complete.”
The award also opens up room for collaborations, both nationally and globally. “There are several opportunities to collaborate with international researchers that are currently underway, and this award supports the time I need to focus on setting them up and pursuing those collaborations,” he said.
How does Dr. Hutton see his research making a real-world impact?
Dr. Hutton and his team are currently developing a software system that can operate across multiple wearable devices, focusing not only on technological innovation but also on their core strengths — clinical validation and system development.
“We’re also doing a lot of evidence generation activities, publishing papers, and presenting at conferences; the fundamental stuff that scientists do,” he said. “But one of my bigger goals is to actually have this software for wearables out there in the community and integrated with the health care systems.”
We hope to develop a trustworthy and scalable software system that can be integrated into consumer-grade wearable products. In collaboration with industry partners, potential users could opt in to enable their devices to passively monitor for signs of cardiac arrest, which would then generate an alert to 9-1-1 when detected.
Speaking to the impact he hopes to make on the lives of patients, Hutton said, “The goal is that patients in cardiac arrest can receive treatment in a much timelier manner, especially when you consider that most cardiac arrests aren’t detected until many minutes, sometimes hours, after they occur. With optimized wearables, we could move from maybe 30-40 minutes before detection to immediate detection and then a response within 10 minutes.”
This presents a major opportunity to move the needle, not just on survival for cardiac arrest patients, but eventually, other critical health emergencies as well.
Dr. Hutton also acknowledged that one of the main challenges of detection is integrating the alert system with the provincial emergency response system, which currently uses an analog system, connected through phone lines. A shift to a digital alert integration with 9-1-1 requires transitioning to digital infrastructure for 9-1-1 alerting: a federally mandated standard called Next Generation 9-1-1. To that end, his team is closely collaborating with BC Emergency Health Services from the early stage of the research to ensure alignment as these systems undergo digital transformation.
Reflecting on the journey (past and future)
When asked if he has any advice or tips for students interested in undertaking research and other early career researchers, Dr. Hutton shared, “My first piece of advice is to seek out interdisciplinary collaboration, and I found that very rewarding because I wasn’t doing my research in a silo.”
“I’ve collaborated with biomedical engineers from the very beginning of my graduate research, and that’s allowed me to consider the real-world constraints of my research from early stages. We’ve also worked with eventual end-users, which gives us more actionable and interesting research results,” he added.
He also highlights the importance of being at the intersection of different fields, “My training was in epidemiology, a background in emergency response and emergency medicine, and an added layer of technology development — it’s allowed me to create a niche for myself. Which can be such a rewarding and interesting experience.”
Lastly, he shared his plans for the near future, “As someone who was born and raised in British Columbia, I’d like to stay here and continue my work with the ambulance system and within UBC.”
“My long-term goal is to build a research program that springs off the success of this wearable research and expands into other areas of emergency response, to build other technologies that can help optimize the response and treatment of critical emergencies.”
