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posted by janrinok on Saturday February 29 2020, @08:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the but,-but,-shiny! dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:45AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:45AM (#964739)

    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.

    Starting Score:    0  points
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2020, @07:49PM (#965043)

    'Cold hands? Not even the fancier finger clip oximeters in the hospital worked, so you need to get your hands warmed up first.'

    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...