How Monitoring Life Started: A Question We Couldn't Answer in 2020

How it all started

In 2020, a group of cardiologists asked Vicente Copoví and Carlos Porras a question they couldn't answer.

They were in the middle of the pandemic. Hospitals across Spain were overwhelmed, and routine care had become anything but routine. These cardiologists had a very specific, very urgent problem: their most vulnerable heart failure patients couldn't — and shouldn't — come in for the check-ups that normally kept their condition in check.

The question they brought was simple to ask and hard to answer: how do you follow a patient you can't safely bring into a hospital?

Vicente, now CEO, and Carlos, now CTO, didn't have a ready answer. Nobody did, really — this wasn't a problem with an existing playbook. So instead of looking for one, they did something slower and harder: they started building an answer together with the clinicians who were living the problem every day, from the first sketch.

Why we didn't start with a product

It would have been faster to start with a device and look for a use case afterward. We didn't do that, and looking back, it's the single decision that shaped everything that came after.

Every design choice in those first months — what to measure, how often, what a clinician actually needed to see versus what was just technically possible to collect — came from sitting with cardiologists managing real patients, not from a whiteboard session imagining what a "future of cardiac care" might look like in the abstract.

From the beginning, the cardiologists who brought the original question stayed close to the work — not as advisors signing off on a finished product, but as the people shaping what got built in the first place. Dr. Fernando Arribas, Head of the Cardiology Department at Hospital 12 de Octubre in Madrid and now Chief Medical Officer. Alongside him, Dr. Ignacio Fernández Lozano (Head of the Arrhythmias Section at Puerta de Hierro University Hospital), Dr. José Luis Merino (President of the European Heart Rhythm Association and Head of the Robotic Arrhythmias Unit at La Paz Hospital), Dr. Joaquín Fernández de la Concha (Pacemaker/ICD and Arrhythmias Unit, Infanta Cristina University Hospital) and Dr. Javier Segovia (Director of the Doctorate Program in Medicine and Surgery, Autonomous University of Madrid) have all been part of shaping the clinical direction of what became Sensocor ML.

That's not a marketing line. It's the operating habit that became Monitoring Life's actual working method: every design decision and every scientific model built side-by-side with clinicians, grounded in real clinical practice, not in what a non-clinical team assumed clinicians might want.

What the pandemic made undeniable

Heart failure has always had a visibility problem. Patients are typically reviewed every six to twelve months, while their condition can shift meaningfully in a matter of days. That gap existed long before 2020 — cardiologists had been managing around it for years, doing the best they could with periodic check-ups and patient-reported symptoms.

What the pandemic did wasn't create that gap. It made it impossible to ignore. When even a routine outpatient visit carried real risk, the cost of that visibility gap stopped being an inconvenience clinicians worked around and became something genuinely dangerous for the patients least able to absorb it.

That's the moment Monitoring Life exists because of — not a market opportunity someone identified in a slide deck, but a specific, urgent clinical need that a group of cardiologists brought directly to the people who would go on to build the company.

Five years later, same question

We're still working on this. We haven't fully solved it — there's no version of this story where a small team in 2020 closes a gap that cardiology has lived with for decades, in one product cycle. We're still validating, still learning, still adjusting based on what clinicians tell us doesn't work as much as what they tell us does.

But the question hasn't changed. Every product decision since that first conversation has been measured against the same standard: does this actually help a clinician see what's happening to a patient between visits, in a way that's simple enough for that patient to sustain every single day?

That's a harder bar than it sounds. It's also the only bar that matters, because a monitoring system nobody keeps using — however technically sophisticated — solves nothing for the patients who needed an answer in 2020 and still need one now.