Open almost any ECG course and you get a gallery of finished pictures: this is an inferior infarct, this is a bundle branch block, learn to recognise them. It works — until you meet a tracing that does not look like any of the pictures.
What is missing is the step in between. Why does that vessel produce that pattern in those leads? What happens to the trace in the twenty minutes after the occlusion? Move an electrode two ribs up and what changes, exactly?
Those questions have concrete answers, and they are far easier to remember than a gallery. So we built tools where you can do the thing instead of looking at the result: place the thrombus yourself, move the electrode yourself, and watch all twelve leads answer.
Built on the ambulance, between calls — because that is where the gap between “I recognise this” and “I understand this” actually costs you.
AcuteLabs is the work of Dennis Sagel, ambulance nurse and researcher. The products come out of teaching colleagues and out of research into prehospital chest-pain triage — not out of a product plan.