14-year-old Indian American kid invents AI-powered app that can evaluate your heart health in just seven seconds. Who is Siddarth Nandyala?

He was just 14 when he solved one of medicine’s biggest challenges – detecting heart disease and preventing an impending heart attack. At an age when his peers were busy playing video games, Siddarth Nandyala, a youngster from Texas, created a smartphone-powered application that apparently detects a potential heart attack in just seven seconds. During trials in India, his brainchild, Circadian AI, identified more than 40 patients with possible cardiovascular conditions, highlighting the potential of technology to transform early diagnosis.

In many cases, cardiovascular diseases are a silent killer - they have no symptoms. Early detection depends on routine checkups, electrocardiograms, stress tests, echocardiograms and blood tests, etc. However, according to Smithsonian Magazine, advanced diagnostic tools such as coronary angiography and right heart catheterisation can only identify cases where the disease was at an advanced stage.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, this is far from the first time Nanyala has invented something. In 2022, he created a prosthetic arm that cost Rs 14,000, as opposed to traditional ones that could cost as high as Rs 28 lakh. In 2024, Siddarth also developed an innovative armband designed to detect falls among elderly people, reportedly achieving an accuracy rate of 96.1 per cent — surpassing that of the Apple Watch.


The user has to place a smartphone near their heart, where the app records the sound of their heartbeat. The captured audio undergoes various amplification algorithms prior to being sent to a cloud-based machine-learning model. The system subsequently evaluates the information and produces a comprehensive evaluation of the user's cardiovascular well-being. An intuitive interface displays results.

Nandyala says the app only detects cardiovascular abnormalities, arrhythmias, and heart valve abnormalities but is not meant to detect what type of cardiovascular disease a person is suffering from.

Heart diseases are the number one cause of death globally, as per WHO figures. One in every three deaths worldwide is from heart attack. Heart disease kills 28.6 lakh Indians every year, and detection is very erratic. However, early detection can improve outlook and survival rates and also improve the quality of a patient’s life.