Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
You might like the Withings Steel HR, which has a traditional mechanical watchface, a heart rate sensor, and about 25 days of battery life: https://www.withings.com/us/en/steel-hr/36rgw/shop?screen=de... Some Garmin and Fitbit models have good battery life — often about a week.
Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
181–190 of 242 posts
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#182Public Service Announcement: You can just check your pulse manually for free. AFIB will be irregularly irregular. As as comparing cancer to AFIB it's definitely not accurate to compare the two directly. A very common cause of AFIB in people younger than 60 for example is 'holiday heart' short-term AFIB related to binge drinking, it is generally self-resolving and transitory, and generally does not require treatment e…
The trouble is really when you're first getting to grips with it. That's the scary time.
Everyone's AF is somewhat different though I imagine.
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#183Earlier 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.
(edit: I'm not in the US so no idea what is typical outside the stories I see in the media)
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm from the US, but I live in a country with "national health care" and... look it sucks. You know what I miss? 1990s era health care for tech workers in the US. When you went in and everything was covered for a $20 co-pay. You want a specific medication, or a non-generic medication in Australia? Too bad. It's not that it costs more, you just can't get it. Things like Wellbutrin are as illegal as crack. And if you d…
That is most certainly not the experience I've had with nationalized health care in Europe. Sounds like an implementation problem more than anything.
I'll add another thing to my experience in Australia. As an immigrant, I'm not covered by national health care. Taxed at a higher rate, plus paying for a visa, and a small fortune if I apply for a PR... and they do nothing to cover me during this time period. Employers don't cover people here, so all I can get is private insurance.
But... private insurance doesn't really cover anything for a year after you pay for the tier you want. So you can get like just emergency coverage -- things like simple ER visits, but things like minor surgery, or anything they can deem is a "pre-existing" condition will take a least a year of paying premiums before you're eligible for benefits. Things like an appendicitis are not covered, there's a cap of like $5k or something on everything in the first year. Luckily I didn't need much coverage... but I'm the best plan I can find here, and if you get seriously ill the first year you're over here you're really just fucked. There's medical screening before your visa can be accepted, but they don't at all cover you if you get in trouble here.
An American friend needed hernia surgery, and he had to pay entirely out of pocket because his insurance wouldn't cover it. Health care... not like it's a regular service you can price compare when you need treatment. You just say, "Fix it!" and I think it cost him something like $18k to have the surgery. Mind you he had health insurance, but, again, it doesn't cover anything the first year you have it.
And it's next to impossible to get anything around mental health covered, even with the top tier private insurance here. Want to maintain your prescription of Adderall? Good luck finding a doctor here who will give you a script. It's all pretty shitty. On top of that... it's all a digitized system, where the government gets full access to your records. There's a question on the visa applications if you've ever seen a psychiatrist. The lawyers strongly caution you not to answer yes on it, as it supposedly makes it harder to get a visa approved... but since it's all data the state has access too... pretty hard to keep any of it a secret.
Anyway look, is the US perfect? No, and I've never been through immigration in the US. But the Australian system is pretty far from perfect. Take people, put them a billion miles away from their friend and family, and then penalize them for getting homesick and seeking mental health... that's insane. (=
I've ranted enough, but a lot of this strikes home for me. I've come to the other side of the world so I can score my long-term medication, medication that something like 10% of the people in the US are on, illegally from prep school kids. That's my experience with the Australian system.
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#185Public Service Announcement: You can just check your pulse manually for free. AFIB will be irregularly irregular. As as comparing cancer to AFIB it's definitely not accurate to compare the two directly. A very common cause of AFIB in people younger than 60 for example is 'holiday heart' short-term AFIB related to binge drinking, it is generally self-resolving and transitory, and generally does not require treatment e…
I have AF and once you're aware of it it's pretty easy to tell when your heart's "gone out". Quick check of pulse confirms it as you say. The trouble is really when you're first getting to grips with it. That's the scary time. Everyone's AF is somewhat different though I imagine.
Monitors tend to be potentially less accurate than manual apical pulse when there is an arrhythmia present, the gold standard for any cardiac is auscultation, aka stethoscope, for a full minute by trained professional.
Medicine is really complex is the short version. Also Sinus Arrythmia is not uncommon.
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#186I 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…
The link isn't working for me (in Japan, if that helps) after the renewal, still. I couldn't find a copy of the page in Google's cache or in the wayback archives. I'm curious since I don't know anything about Cardiogram at all; is DeepHeart a part of Cardiogram? That is, are all of those detection capabilities part of your app if I have an Apple Watch?
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#187A third of those whose watches detected an irregular pulse were confirmed to have atrial fibrillation using the ECG technology, researchers said.
Some 84 percent of the irregular pulse notifications were later confirmed to have been AF episodes, data showed.
What is it then, 1/3 or 4/5?
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#188If there are any MDs around, I'd be curious to know if there's some kind of data-driven baseline about there being a regular heart beat to begin with, or if there being one is an underlying assumption that's taken for granted. (Either way, kudos to Apple for contributing to health science.)
We’ve monitored hearts for a long time. It is common for a heart to skip a beat or maybe double a beat occasionally (a stethoscope on your own heart for 30 mins would demonstrate that).
I don’t think Atrial Fibrillation is ever a normal sign.
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#189Dongle+app supports Android and iOS.
No prices on En page though, but the official price for the Russian market is 3500 RUB ~ $54
Re: Apple Watch detects irregular heart beat in large U.S. study
#190I 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…