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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, 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.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.