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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: 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.