Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 242 posts

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#141

Post by akg_67 »

GuiA wrote: post #99
Waterluvian wrote: post #92

I can see a future where my doctor gives me a wristband to wear for a month then return as a part of each annual checkup. Though maybe it gets even better than that and we just all start wearing watches again. I want that feature but I'm not a watch wearer.

The future is your insurance company making you wear a smart watch 24/7 if you don’t want to pay a huge premium. I predict it’s going to be a huge quagmire over the next decade or so.

Insurance companies are already doing this. My friend gets $5 discount on his monthly premium for wearing a garmin wristband.

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#142

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #88
jacquesm wrote: post #12

Like with any medical test: if you do more tests you will find more incidence. The same thing happened with various forms of cancer screening. If we were to test everybody for everything very few people would be found to be 100% and a lot of unnecessary procedures would be the result. Given the obesity problem this result should not be a surprising finding anyway.

Ok, so what? Shouldn’t we be cheering the fact that a consumer device can potentially detect this without ever requiring a much costlier visit to the ER or doctors office? My Apple Watch was a few hundred bucks. My latest ER visit for tachycardia (idle heart rate over 100) came to over $3000, with health insurance. And all they did was tests.

I can't fathom how anyone would pay this.

For less than three grand, you could fly to Europe for a weekend, stay in a five star hotel, and have all the tests done while you're there.

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#143

Post by nhooyr »

mehrdadn wrote: post #107
aboutruby wrote: post #22

I saw a few posts on Reddit about how the Apple Watch basically saved people's life: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/a40qm5/heading_... https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/9zrdq5/how_an_a... I'm sure there is a lot more. (Also all the people losing weight)

I wish there was a heartbeat-measuring watch with the battery life of a dumb watch. My watch goes like 5 years (I've lost count honestly) on its original battery. I'd love to have something watching out for my health but I just can't see myself moving to a smartwatch that needs recharging every 18 hours when I don't even need the smartness crap...

get a wireless charger and put it on your nightstand, problem solved.

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#144

Post by im3w1l »

jacquesm wrote: post #12

Like with any medical test: if you do more tests you will find more incidence. The same thing happened with various forms of cancer screening. If we were to test everybody for everything very few people would be found to be 100% and a lot of unnecessary procedures would be the result. Given the obesity problem this result should not be a surprising finding anyway.

> Like with any medical test: if you do more tests you will find more incidence.

I've heard this line parroted a lot but a robust Bayesian analysis should mitigate this.

Like by setting appropriate thresholds you should be able to either

* do the same amount of interventions with more of them being helpful

* maintain the rate of helpfulness but doing more procedurees.

or even a mix of the two. Testing all the things all the time on all the people would be a boon if we just did it correctly.

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#145

Post by zzzeek »

appleiigs wrote: post #110
zzzeek wrote: post #101

this is kind of a trivial question but is the apple watch HR monitor known to be better than that of FitBit? I got a Charge 3 for Christmas and I barely even wear it anymore, as it would say things like "95 bpm" when I'm working out and I'm clearly at around 135 bpm. you can say things like "oh wear it higher / lower / tighter" whatever but if it's that prone to being 40 bpm off the mark, what use is it.

In my experience, FitBit Charge HR 2 was useless. Same issue with you where it would 40 bpm off or provide no reading at all. Apple Watch 3 was pretty bad too. It would give inaccurate often enough that I couldn't use it for training in a heart rate zone. For example, I'd be walking for warm up and it would give a reading of 160 at the beginning, then back down to 110, then 10 mins later back to 160. I can't imagine…

this is the thing I wonder if the mechanism by which wrist-based HR monitors work (seems to be optical) is just not effective for some people, for some physiological reason.

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#146

Post by PakG1 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #92

I can see a future where my doctor gives me a wristband to wear for a month then return as a part of each annual checkup. Though maybe it gets even better than that and we just all start wearing watches again. I want that feature but I'm not a watch wearer.

It's already happening. Some insurers are giving lower rates to people who wear this stuff and allows the insurer to see the data for better pricing premiums for each individual. I also had purchased stock in a small cap company that makes tech to allow telemedicine to be possible.

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#147

Post by PakG1 »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #142
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so what? Shouldn’t we be cheering the fact that a consumer device can potentially detect this without ever requiring a much costlier visit to the ER or doctors office? My Apple Watch was a few hundred bucks. My latest ER visit for tachycardia (idle heart rate over 100) came to over $3000, with health insurance. And all they did was tests.

I can't fathom how anyone would pay this. For less than three grand, you could fly to Europe for a weekend, stay in a five star hotel, and have all the tests done while you're there.

If your insurance pays for it, you probably wouldn't.

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#148

Post by PakG1 »

mbreese wrote: post #85
astura wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends... does "Here’s something. But, it’s not serious" take expensive, risky, and invasive medical tests to get to the "not serious" part?

Exactly -- for those 45% with the false positive, you will be doing emotional harm to many of them, even without an invasive followup test. And then, if you knew that 45% of people got a false positive, how likely is the 5% (the true positives who really need it) going to believe their initial result and even get the followup?

EULA and UI should emphasize that this is not a sure thing, please see a doctor to be sure. Why would anyone get mad at that? My grandpa noticed my dad losing a ton of weight. He told my dad there might be something wrong with him, go check it out. Turns out it was cancer, saved my dad's life. Should my dad be upset at my grandpa for causing emotional stress if it was nothing?

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#149

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

brandonb wrote: post #115
taspeotis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They forgot to renew their domain: Domain name: cardiogr.am Registrar: abcdomain (ABCDomain LLC) Status: on hold ... Registered: 2015-03-17 Last modified: 2019-03-17 Expires: 2019-03-17

You got it—I renewed it 40 minutes ago. Bear with us as we get the renewal processed and DNS propagated.

One might say it's important kinda like a... heartbeat.

Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study

#150

Post by bhl »

brandonb wrote: post #82

I work at a related company (Cardiogram), and there's a surprising amount of signal locked in the humble heart rate sensor -- we've run multiple studies with UCSF showing accurate detection of sleep apnea, high blood pressure, and even diabetes using off-the-shelf heart rate sensors and a deep neural network, DeepHeart: https://blog.cardiogr.am/screening-with-wearables-what-do-th... If you're an engineer or payer rel…

Do you know of an open dataset to experiment on?
Post reply on HN