Apple Watches can now monitor the wearer for an irregular pulse and provide a brief but detailed ECG
of March 28th, the owners of newish Apple Watches in 19 countries woke up to find their timepiece was now a medical device. Two new features arrived. One monitors the wearer for an irregular pulse. The other allows a brief but detailed electronic portrait, or, to be captured and inspected for signs of a common heart arrhythmia called “atrial fibrillation”, or AFib.
Jonathan Mant, a professor of primary-care research at the University of Cambridge, runs a study of the over-65s that is hoping to discover if AFib screening can prevent stroke and other problems, such as heart attacks or even dementia. Dr Mant says AFib, picked up clinically, is important and worth treating, but that may not be true of the cases found by the watch. “We really have no idea what that would mean,” he says.
The recent “Apple Heart Study”, covering 420,000 patients, looked at the predictive value of the device’s monitoring for irregular pulses. It found that the watch only agrees with a gold-standard method 84% of the time. The feature is intended to prompt wearers to use theapp, which is designed to deliver a diagnosis. A study conducted by a research organisation contracted by Apple found the app’s algorithm was able to correctly identify 98.3% of true positives and 99.6% of true negatives.
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