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Apple Watch Series 4 ECG, Irregular Heart Rate Features Are Now Available (theverge.com)
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.
I love you Big Sensor up my ass all the time.
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.
when I'm jacking it to him
-Rei
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?
I wonder how long until someone's EKG reading is part of the user data advertisers can tap? "Tired of an irregular sinus rhythm? Try new Rhythm-Rite!"
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.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
But, hey, yeah--whatever. Great joke.
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!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This new Apple Watch can magically make your insurance premiums go up upon irregular heartbeat detection.
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.
Sad they're marketing this as a feature. Should be sued into oblivion. I forget the number but these fitness devices are largely inaccurate; just ask your doctor.
I'm not an apple fan, but, THIS IS NOT a first line device. Say you have Afib or some other problem. This might help MONITOR your heart but if anyone thinks this is a first line device, you need to have the watch taken away and give you some blocks to play with.
Apple has a patent (from quite a few years ago) about doing user authentication by matching ECG characteristics. ECG "fingerprints" are actually pretty good - much better than 99% (i.e. 1% false positive, 1% false negative) and significantly better than fingerprint readers.
Wear your Apple iECG and authenticate to your other iDevice.
Yes, I had an ECG done as an add-on to a complete blood workup while traveling in Asia. The total cost was about $20 US.