Apple Watch Series 4 ECG, Irregular Heart Rate Features Are Now Available (theverge.com) 39
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, with an update to watchOS, Apple is making its electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG) reading feature available to Apple Watch Series 4 owners. It's also releasing an irregular rate notification feature that will be available on Apple Watches going back to Series 1. Both are a part of watchOS 5.1.2. To take an EKG, you open up the EKG app on the Watch and lightly rest your index finger on the crown for 30 seconds. The Watch then acts like a single-lead EKG to read your heart rhythm and record it into the Health app on your phone. From there, you can create a PDF report to send to your doctor.
The irregular heart rate monitoring is passive. Apple says that it checks your rhythm every two hours or so (depending on whether you're stationary or not), and if there are five consecutive readings that seem abnormal, it will alert you and suggest you reach out to a doctor. If you have been previously diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, Apple's setup process tells you not to use the feature. Apple tells me these features are most definitely not diagnostic tools. In fact, before you can activate either of them, you will need to page through several screens of information that try to put their use into context and warn you to contact your doctor if needed. They are also not the sort of features Apple expects users to really use on a regular basis. The EKG feature, in particular, should only really be used if you feel something abnormal going on, and then you should only share the resulting report with your doctor, not act on it directly. Angela Chen from The Verge notes that these features have only received "clearance" from the FDA, which is not the same thing as FDA "approval": The Apple Watch is in Class II. For Class II and Class I, the FDA doesn't give "approval," it just gives clearance. Class I and Class II products are lower-risk products -- as [Jon Speer, co-founder of Greenlight Guru] puts it, a classic Class I example is something like a tongue depressor -- and it's much easier to get clearance than approval.
The irregular heart rate monitoring is passive. Apple says that it checks your rhythm every two hours or so (depending on whether you're stationary or not), and if there are five consecutive readings that seem abnormal, it will alert you and suggest you reach out to a doctor. If you have been previously diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, Apple's setup process tells you not to use the feature. Apple tells me these features are most definitely not diagnostic tools. In fact, before you can activate either of them, you will need to page through several screens of information that try to put their use into context and warn you to contact your doctor if needed. They are also not the sort of features Apple expects users to really use on a regular basis. The EKG feature, in particular, should only really be used if you feel something abnormal going on, and then you should only share the resulting report with your doctor, not act on it directly. Angela Chen from The Verge notes that these features have only received "clearance" from the FDA, which is not the same thing as FDA "approval": The Apple Watch is in Class II. For Class II and Class I, the FDA doesn't give "approval," it just gives clearance. Class I and Class II products are lower-risk products -- as [Jon Speer, co-founder of Greenlight Guru] puts it, a classic Class I example is something like a tongue depressor -- and it's much easier to get clearance than approval.
Headline (Score:5, Funny)
If I just went with the headline, I might think the capability to cause an irregular heart rates was being promoted as a feature.
That's some serious feature creep.
Re: (Score:2)
I might think the capability to cause an irregular heart rates was being promoted as a feature.
After you pay for it and check your bank account balance, it is.
The entire watch costs less than a singe ECG test. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I had an ECG test done as part of a routine annual checkup last week. It took a student doing an internship about three minutes, and would have taken less except that they did two runs because I have an unusual heart condition. Now, I don't know how much the device cost (I would guess on the order of 10kEUR), but I'm sure that it gets amortised over a lot of patients, and the cost of the intern's time would be far less than a cup of coffee.
Re: (Score:1)
When to use (Score:2)
The EKG feature, in particular, should only really be used if you feel something abnormal going on, and then you should only share the resulting report with your doctor, not act on it directly.
In the case that you feel something abnormal is going on, you should see a doctor anyhow. Especially with all the disclaimers that you can't trust the results one way or the other. So what's the purpose of using this feature at all, then?
Re:When to use (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Don't assume running 15 miles and being in good health and good shape makes you safe, it makes you in a low risk group. I had a coworker who although 10 years older than me, biked 10 miles to and from work (real biking, up and down some nice Austin hills) and could kick my ass up and down the street without breaking a sweat. Had lunch with him one day, he was dead 2 days later from a heart attack. He had a chicken salad for lunch, in case you were wondering. He was a pretty healthy person, except apparently he had a bad ticker.
2) Heart attacks are scary because they're fairly asymptomatic from the victims perspective, at least until they get critical. But the list of early warning signs is long and unreliable. Any of them (like tingling fingers, "chest" pain) could be, and probably are, something else.
3) At least in my family heart attacks aren't sudden. In all cases the person who had one didn't feel well in the morning, and was in the hospital later that evening. While I am not sure it will be the case, if somehow the watch was able to quantify what the victim was feeling in a meaningful way, and direct him to a doctor, and a real ECG could confirm, that's great. Of course if a million people charge the ER demanding an ECG because of a false positive, we're going to have a deadly problem.
Until it gets used, who knows. It could be snake oil, it could be a life saver. We're going to find out I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course if a million people charge the ER demanding an ECG because of a false positive, we're going to have a deadly problem.
Or the opposite - they choose to not go see health services because the watch didn't find anything wrong, and then keel over dead a few weeks later due to a condition a cardiologist would have found.
That's the problem - if it's only to be used when you suspect a problem, why use it at all instead of seeing a doctor? And if it's not instead, what good does it do?
Re:When to use (Score:4, Interesting)
Atrial fibrillation comes in a few different flavors: paroxysmal, early persistent, long standing persistent. Then there's silent afib which, as the name suggests, people are unaware they have and are at a risk of stroke. That said, this maybe a potentially nice feature that may save a lot of people from having strokes. I've seen some docs talking about this on Linked in and I'm curious as to how many of these patients will really have afib.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
That's part of the reason for all the disclaimers. The other part is that it's much easier to get clearance to sell it when the claims are minimized. I'm sure that it actually does a pretty good job.
Re: (Score:2)
A doctor won't treat you for afib just because an Apple watch tells them to. First, an apple watch's report doesn't meet the definition of afib from the expert consensus statement on afib. The doctor would do an EKG, talk to you about symptoms, history, and maybe do a wearable monitor. Perhaps even an implantable monitor if the risk was high enough.
How long until health specific advertising (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Gotta have consent. Going without it has consequences that are usually stiff fines. Albeit, a single line in that massive user agreement many people don't read may do it. Advertisement: Got Afib? Get (insert blood thinner here) at deep discounts!
Cause of afib (Score:2)
A physician I work with told me: "Afib is more common in men than in women, therefore we know women cause afib!"
Interested to see what we may learn from this. It sounds a lot more tolerable than a 30-day monitor and easier than a implantable loop recorder.
Counterpoint (Score:2)
A physician I work with told me: "Afib is more common in men than in women, therefore we know women cause afib!"
Lesbians exists, therefore no.
Unless they also have higher rates? Hmm!
This feature works pretty well, has a lot of text (Score:4, Informative)
I've tried taking an EKG a few times today, the results seem pretty consistent, and agree with what I was expecting in terms of my heart rate (even lower than I thought in fact, shows the value of regular exercise!).
Of interest, there was a fair amount of screen to wade through in turning this on basically telling you it did not replace a real doctor and so on and so forth. Even while you are measuring your heart rate it has a tiny bit of text saying "At no time will we be trying to detect heart attacks". They just report if anything seems odd about the heartbeat and leave it up to you, though they do let you send the EKG results to someone later if you choose.
The results are stored in the Health app on your phone only, not sent to Apple - you can either just keep them there, delete previous measurements, or send them to someone via PDF I think (just sends a graph, no csv style data I could see).
Since you can delete recordings the nice thing is, you could potentially use this to take one-off EKG readings for other people, send it to them via email, and then delete that reading from your own records. I plan to try it out on a few family members at Christmas to see what it says.
This is NOT a first line device (Score:2)