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Heart Rate Limitations Show Why You Shouldn't Get Your Medical Advice From the Apple Watch:
The Apple Watch is the smartwatch to beat. It's massively popular, has a full range of features, and compared to some of its competitors, leads the way in rethinking how wearables can function within the health sector. During the Apple Watch portion of Apple events, you can generally expect a feel-good reel of real-life users sharing stories of how the watch saved their lives by notifying them of their irregular heartbeat. That said, Apple's own FDA application for its ECG app admits the watch does not detect atrial fibrillation (AFib) for heart rates exceeding 120 beats per minute—a limitation that a Forbes report suggests could leave a large number of Apple Watch users with a false sense of security.
That 120bpm limitation is, as it turns out, significant, according to Forbes. Mayo Clinic says that the heart rate of AFib patients can range anywhere from 100 to 175bpm—meaning the Apple Watch isn't looking at a decent chunk of folks who may be affected.
(Score: 4, Informative) by anubi on Sunday March 01 2020, @12:26AM (6 children)
Sometimes, you just want confirmation of your heart rate and rhythm. There are free Android apps for that.
They use a phone camera and light to mimic a pulse oximeter. Many Androids have their camera lens and light in close proximity, and you can cover both with a finger.
When you place your finger over both camera and light, the camera sees red light amplitude modulated by your blood pressure, and the app uses ranging to center the readings real-time on a moving chart.
I believe this is called a photoplethysmograph...that is display of heart activity by watching transparency of things like fingers or ear lobes.
If you just want something to give you confirmation of a "that doesn't feel right", it's a quick way to check it out before getting other people in the fray.
Look for "heart rate monitor".,. There are several out there. I like the simple one that just pops an oscilloscope type display on the screen and shows me the rate. It does not doctor the data to make it look just like an EKG. The raw transparency data looks like ocean waves. Not spikes.
I did not know these generic Android heart rate apps were out there. I thought I had to buy an awful expensive gadget. Nah..the optical way is free, no less. I'm using a Moto E5, which just happened to have an ideal setup for this.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:45AM (1 child)
If you don't want to use your phone (it might send your data somewhere???), they are cheap on eBay.
Here's one for less than USD $3.00, with free shipping. Just wipe down with isopropyl when you get it, in case of contamination from China...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Finger-Pulse-Oximeter-Pouch-Storage-Pack-Carrying-Case-Protective-Bag/193292728000 [ebay.com]
I bought something similar a few years ago, it was about $5 at that time. Worked great as long as your finger was warm. Cold hands? Not even the fancier finger clip oximeters in the hospital worked, so you need to get your hands warmed up first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:49PM
Aye, and here's a killer, they don't quite work as expected on people with poor circulation, irrespective of how warm you get their hands (real heart rate 79 bpm, clip measured rate 124 bpm).
It's useful to have a secondary means of checking the heart rate, those cheap Chinese blood pressure monitors do a reasonable job, but, from recent experience, as they're not 'medical grade' instrumentation, to eliminate one set of weirdies I've experienced with them, I'd use a dedicated known stable external power supply to power it to take the readings rather than rely on batteries - I started getting suspicious about what was happening to the readings when the batteries started running down, so tried two sets of fresh shiny new D*r*c*ll batteries, which gave two significantly different sets of results (the delta on the heart rate alone was 25 bpm, sys was +20, dia was +7), switch to external psu, no significant difference between two runs (deltas; heart rate 2, sys 1, dia 2).
Even having a secondary means of measuring the heart rate has its own issues, just as a cautionary example of 'do not necessarily take as gospel the readings of the machines which go pling bling dlingaling..etc.', based on a real life set of 131 readings taken over a couple of months with both a cheap Chinese finger oxymeter and a blood pressure meter of similar provenance, both bought from Amazon, and arbitrarily taking the oxymeter pulse rate values as the reference;
The average difference in heart rate readings between the devices (bpm): -1.88
The maximum differences in readings between devices (bpm): +14 and -13
The % readings within ± 0 bpm of each other: 6.9
The % readings within ± 1 bpm of each other: 33.6
The % readings within ± 2 bpm of each other: 50.4
The % readings within ± 3 bpm of each other: 66.4
The % readings within ± 4 bpm of each other: 77.0
The % readings within ± 5 bpm of each other: 80.9
The % readings within ± 6 bpm of each other: 87.8
The % readings within ± 7 bpm of each other: 90.8
The % readings within ± 8 bpm of each other: 92.4
I can't find the documentation for the meters at this minute with their supposed accuracy figures, nor can I find the quick and dirty figures I wrote down when messing around with the batteries and external PSU connected to these things (broke personal rule12a, Always plonk test data directly into a spreadsheet..no matter how trivial the test is), paperwork, especially ephemeral paperwork, gravitates towards the black hole filing system that lurks under a bench in the workshop...
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday March 02 2020, @12:23AM
How is a smartwatch supposed to detect AFIB? Irregularity in the (nominally regular) timing between beats? How would that distinguish AFIB from VFIB? It's not like there's a dongle attachment for chest electrodes. That's my fucking idea, don't you steal it. $2000 bucks thank you come again.
But seriously, how does fib detection work on a smartwatch or even a smartphone?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2020, @12:50AM
One of the issues I see with this is that every phone is different. Every camera is different and the lights on different phones may be different. So we need a reliable control to calibrate the device before using.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2020, @05:31AM (1 child)
Or you could just place your fingers under your jaw. Or you could just stay still for a moment and mentally feel yourself internally to feel your heartbeat. But apparently no. People are so out of touch with themselves they've got to pay money to figure out something they've been feeling all their life. Crazy.
Have gym and health classes been cut from schools?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2020, @06:47AM
I have also had doubts since the blood pressure meter at the WalMart had fits reading me several years ago. I thought it was something else.
A friend had a pulse oximeter he would verify himself with. We passed that thing around. We saw what each other's readings were.
I was erratic. So was my friends. But the others were quite steady.
It had been maybe 30 years ago I last saw a doctor. And I had just got onto Medicare So I presented at the doctor's office. AFib and leaky Mitral valve.
Even if you are healthy, get one of these things and baseline yourself. So you know what you should look like. If funnies show up, it at least lets you see in a graphical and screen capturable form the situation you can show to your doctor. He knows exactly what those squiggles mean, and can advise you from there.