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According to a study conducted through heartbeat measurement app Cardiogram and the University of California, San Francisco, the Apple Watch is 97 percent accurate in detecting the most common abnormal heart rhythm when paired with an AI-based algorithm.
The study involved 6,158 participants recruited through the Cardiogram app on Apple Watch. Most of the participants in the UCSF Health eHeart study had normal EKG readings. However, 200 of them had been diagnosed with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (an abnormal heartbeat). Engineers then trained a deep neural network to identify these abnormal heart rhythms from Apple Watch heart rate data.
Cardiogram began the study with UCSF in 2016 to discover whether the Apple Watch could detect an oncoming stroke. About a quarter of strokes are caused by an abnormal heart rhythm, according to Cardiogram co-founder and data scientist for UCSF's eHeart study Brandon Ballinger.
Yes, but can the Apple Watch then pace you or shock you?
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Sunday May 14 2017, @12:50PM (5 children)
Then comes the next question as how much computer performance that is needed to do these tasks.
Sample it, upload it to iTunes Music Match and see if what comes back is Rock'n'Roll (normal) or Experimental Jazz (atrial fibrillation).
Seriously (disclosure: I have permanent AF) it is not a subtle effect that can only be spotted by experts poring over ECGs - I'm not saying it would be trivial to generate reliable diagnoses that meet clinical standards, but it ain't gonna to be a job for Deep Blue. A watch that could detect it would be good for those with intermittent AF that won't perform on demand for the doctor. Might have got me an earlier diagnosis before it set in permanently.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 14 2017, @01:25PM (4 children)
OK - question. You have the specific condition mentioned in the article. My lifelong condition, has been a heart murmur. I suppose that given time, Apple will detect heart murmurs and other problems. But, the question is, do you really want to know every time your heart does a little out-of-synch dance step?
Speaking personally, I knew about my condition when I was a kid. But, I had things to do, places to go, and people to do. Among those things, was joining the Navy, and seeing the world. When asked at my induction physical if I had any heart conditions, I just kept my mouth shut. Hey, if they figured it out, I'd just say I didn't know, right? Well, I slipped by that physical, and I slipped past more physicals at boot camp. A corpsman out in the fleet finally caught it, and he asked if I knew that I have a murmur. "Huh, what? What is that?" He sent me for another physical, with a real doctor, who couldn't find it.
Now, if I had spend my youth wearing a heart monitor, that told me every time my heart stuttered, I'm certain that my life would have been very different.
So, I'm wondering how many people really WANT to monitor the workings of their bodies? It's sure to make you worry - and probably needlessly.
And, hey, what about false positives? An especially bad case of gas might convince the monitor that you're dying! (or, it might interpret a bad heart attack as a case of gas, lol)
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday May 14 2017, @03:04PM
It's sure to make you worry - and probably needlessly.
It's worse than that in this case. As I noted in a post below, the algorithm in this study actually had a 75% false positive rate (that is, if it flagged you for "abnormal heart rhythm," there's a ~75% chance you don't have one at all).
Given other characteristics of the test (i.e., low false negative rate), this could still work okay as a preliminary diagnostic tool in a medical context. But most people (frankly, including most doctors) don't have a good intuitive sense about how stats work in medical tests. And a lot of people who ultimately end up with "false positives" will go around worrying about why they were flagged -- even if it's just a bad test. The anxiety produced by such tests can actually lead to even more negative health outcomes.
That's one of the reasons why doctors sometimes recommend LESS screening -- they come under fire by people who say, "But, but, but... we need to screen young women for breast cancer all the time, because even if we only find one case, we save a life!" But -- aside from unnecessary invasive confirmation tests like biopsies -- studies on false positives show that they can become an obsession for some people; studies show that women with false positives are as psychologically damaged as women who actually have breast cancer for about 6 months after a false screening, and measurable negative psychological effect persist for an average of 3 years. Anxiety can lead to depression, depression can lead to bad habits (smoking, obesity, etc.).
Excessive screenings where there are high false positive rates can thus actually CAUSE more medical problems than they solve. I have no doubt that this Apple Watch algorithm at its current accuracy level would cause more harm than good, given that there are other easy and non-invasive tests for abnormal heart rhythm with a much lower false positive rate.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 14 2017, @03:06PM
The point is to monitor so that a health care facility can fix the problem before it becomes a real problem. Not to make people unable to do what they want. This way people won't even have to tell what the real deal is. They can always say it's for "workout performance monitoring" etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Sunday May 14 2017, @03:08PM (1 child)
OK - question. You have the specific condition mentioned in the article. My lifelong condition, has been a heart murmur. I suppose that given time, Apple will detect heart murmurs and other problems. But, the question is, do you really want to know every time your heart does a little out-of-synch dance step?
Correction: I (now) have permanent AF (and if your doctor doesn't spot that in 30 seconds you should probably check their pulse) - TFA is talking about the intermittent form. But no, I'm not going to buy an Apple Watch to get reminders of a condition I already have and which doesn't need day-to-day management.
However, in my case intermittent AF was the precursor of a bigger tachycardia problem that eventually led to heart failure (from which I recovered, but it wasn't funny) and permanent AF. However, when I initially went to my doctor having experienced bouts of irregular heartbeat, nothing showed up on the day and he literally said "there's nothing wrong with your heart". If I'd been able to gather evidence then I'd have pursued it more aggressively.
Current solution (you've probably had it) to data gathering is that they loan you a portable heart monitor the size of a cigarette packet, with about 5 self-adhesive electrodes which fall off after an hour because the hospital has bought them from the lowest bidder.
What would be more useful in my case is a tachycardia alarm that might help regulate my beta-blocker dose. A Pre-condition of that is that it should be able to distinguish AF (not a problem if you know about it) from tachycardia (definitely a problem)...
Slightly O/T: ever looked at the manual for one of those home blood pressure monitors? "May give erroneous results in the presence of irregular heartbeat". (Translation: if you have AF take 3 readings and write down the one that is consistent with you still being conscious). I'm absolutely, positively sure that the doctors and hospitals that use automatic BP monitors have special industrial-strength versions that don't have that problem (however, I did notice that my cardiologist took BP the old fashioned way).
Now, if I had spend my youth wearing a heart monitor, that told me every time my heart stuttered, I'm certain that my life would have been very different.
But then there are always cases of apparently healthy people who discover their heart condition when they drop dead during military training or on the sports field... I guess, people should be able to make their own choice about how much they want to know.
However, yeah - there's an ethical elephant in the room that people don't seem to mention - even when discussing perception of risk:
Say you are an individual and you see evidence that taking magic pill X reduces your chance of acute conflobulitus from 2:100 to 1:100. Cue headlines on "New pill halves the risk of conflobulitus!" and subsequent responses by sensible people of how misleading it is to describe increases in small risks like that and how it would be quite rational to decline the kind offer of pill X or, at least, make serious enquiries about the possible side effects.
However, say you are now a healthcare provider serving millions of people and dealing with 20,000 cases of conflobulitus. Reducing that to 10,000 really is going to have an impact on your conflobulitus budget, so from your point of view that is a big deal (even if you don't get a kickback from the makers of Pill X). The numbers don't really matter: the point is that doctors, hospitals, insurers mostly only deal with ill people which gives them a much smaller denominator for their risk assessments.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 14 2017, @04:14PM
OMG! Conflobulitus! I was bitten by mosquitos in Africa!
Seriously, thanks for the answer. You've put things into perspective, pretty nicely.
I'll add that "think of the children" plays in there somewhere. Risks that I was quite happy to take, for myself, look entirely different if it's the kids who are at risk. Or, today, risks that are acceptable even for my kids, are not acceptable for the grandchildren. Funny how perspective changes, with time.