Since the arrival of the Apple Watch six years ago, we have seen countless stories about how the wearable device saved someone’s life. The smartwatch features several health sensors, the most useful of which is the heart rate sensor that passively monitors the user’s pulse. The watch can trigger alerts if algorithms detect an arrhythmia or irregular heart rate, which can push the user to seek professional help.
But those anecdotes are not enough to objectively measure the usefulness of wearable devices in monitoring certain conditions, so a team of doctors set out to observe patients who suffer from atrial fibrillation (AF) and use Apple Watch or Fitbit devices that can measure heart rate. . They found that the group with this medical condition using wearables had undergone more medical procedures than the control group. However, smartwatch users have not overwhelmed doctors with calls compared to the group of people with the same condition who do not own wearable devices.
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AF is the kind of condition devices like the Apple Watch are designed for. It can lead to serious complications if left untreated, so early detection can improve patient management. While devices like the Apple Watch are cleared by the FDA to detect heart rate irregularities in healthy people, patients with known heart conditions also use them to monitor their heart condition.
According to the author of the new study, Libo Wang, cardiologists often see patients who have been diagnosed with AF who bring data from Apple Watch and Fitbit. “There are a good number of patients using these wearable devices outside of the FDA-approved indication,” he told The Verge. “That was kind of a motivation to start, not raising the alarm, but asking questions.”
The study, published on the JAMA Network, compared 125 people with AF who visited the University of Utah Health over a 90-day period and mentioned using a wearable device such as the Apple Watch or Fitbit with 500 AF patients who were not using. smart watches to monitor your health. terms. The control group had characteristics similar to those of the subjects, including age, socioeconomic status, and the number of times they visited the doctor. The two groups had similar heart rate averages over the 90 days, indicating that they had the same average heart health.
“People using handheld devices didn’t necessarily call the office more,” Wang told the blog, adding that the finding was a pleasant surprise. But during the 90 days, the wearable device user group had more medical procedures than the others. In particular, the researchers said that Watch and Fitbit users underwent more ablations, which is a procedure that involves scarring of heart tissue to restore a normal heartbeat.
However, the researchers cannot explain whether the wearable device users underwent the ablations because they had more severe symptoms than the control group or because access to cardiac data convinced them to seek help.
Wang said there are two ways to interpret the findings. Patients may decide to buy an Apple Watch due to a worsening heart rate, in which case ablations are beneficial. But others might think that their fibrillation is getting worse after wearing the watch even when it is not, in which case ablations could be a “waste of time and a risk to the patient.”
Either way, more research will be required to determine precisely how wearable devices can be used to improve the health of users who already have AF.
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