Maximizing the Therapeutic Potential of Music through Tailored Therapy with Physiological Feedback in Cardiovascular Disease

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Cardiovascular disease is the world’s leading cause of death, and hypertension is its foremost medical risk factor. Reducing blood pressure in hypertensive patients has positive cardiovascular effects, and music listening offers non-pharmacological ways to regulate heart rate and blood pressure. Presently, the most effective way to administer music inventions with long-lasting effects is labor-intensive and relies on professional therapists’ intuitions, making it non-scalable to large cohorts. HEART.FM is an app-creation initiative to democratize access to personalized music medicine interventions, informed by physiological feedback. Current music therapy apps fail to address the subjectivity and specificity inherent in individual music response; a gap further exists between music therapy apps and physiological feedback. By leveraging advances in wearable ECG monitors and portable blood pressure sensors, HEART.FM will offer music therapy based on individual users’ physiological feedback around musical change points and transitions, which correspond to emotionally salient moments in music listening. HEART.FM exploits the music structure knowledge and cross-modal music-physiology analysis methods developed and trialed in the ERC project COSMOS to advance the state of the art by linking physiological feedback with computational music structure analysis to provide personalized music listening therapy to achieve targeted autonomic nervous system responses. A development goal will be to make HEART.FM ready for large-scale deployment in randomized, controlled research trials that can establish music-hypertension cause-effect relationships for healthy individuals as well as hypertensive patients. HEART.FM will benefit the research community by offering a crowdsourced portal for collecting research data in cardiovascular disease and music-based preventative therapies. The PoC will explore commercialization and market solutions in both music and medical sectors.