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#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]
On the morning 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 ecg, to be captured and inspected for signs of a common heart arrhythmia called “atrial fibrillation”, or AFib.
Americans have had these options since December, but their global expansion puts the technology squarely within the purview of public-health systems, which typically think carefully about how to screen for health conditions. The watch is also spurring debate about how doctors should handle the AFib that it and other consumer devices, such as AliveCor, detect.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 the ecg app, 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.
Yet neither trial included randomised controls, which would offer the kind of information doctors want. This is now planned among the over-65s. There is also an urgent need to understand how common intermittent AFib is, and its consequences. This is something the watch might help with, by providing reams of data that are otherwise difficult to come by.
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