Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Large-Scale Assessment of a Smartwatch to Identify Atrial Fibrillation (nejm.org)
78 points by areoform on Nov 18, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments


For some years I have tracked my AF using a Polar chest band, which dumps heart rate records into my phone via bluetooth. Then I ship it to a server in influxdb and render it with grafana.

It's all very non-medically approved but I have found it super useful to see the benefits of exercise (in my case anyway) in managing and somewhat taming my out of rhythm periods. I can get an idea how hard to push my heart before it goes out.


Can you actually visualize the heart rhythm using a Polar band? For some reason, I always thought they only sent the pulse rate.

Or are you able to detect AFib using pulse rate alone?


Yes, it is clearly obvious just from pulse rate when my heart goes out of rhythm.The rate suddenly spikes and becomes highly variable. It's just as obvious when it drops back into rhythm. For me, that's typically a few minutes or hours after it goes out.


Newish Polar bands (H10, maybe H7) send data on each beat. There are apps that use this to track heart rate variability (the variance in the gap between heart beats) which can be used as a measure of "readiness" in athletes


It’s what a doctor does (at patients bedside, without ecg) - irregularly irregular; fast or slow, high degree of accuracy


just to understand - do you use this to avoid out of rhythm periods when excercising (by monitoring your heart rate), and then to have some evidence of less and less AF over time, thanks to the excercise?


Yes, exactly. Not a doctor but my AF responds well to exercise, I just need to keep it below the level that makes my heart go out.


How dramatic or not are the affects on the rhythm of exercise?


It’s not what your asking, but having tried to exercise when in AF it’s horrible. A steam engine with a hole in the boiler is what it feels like, but with more sweat.


This is the study Apple did with Stanford. It's based on the photoplethysmograph (PPG) sensor from the pre-Series 4 Apple Watches. Presumably the new Apple heart study announced will also use the ECG in the Series 4 and later [1].

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/apple-launches-three-...


You can check the waveform with one of these: https://www.amazon.com/EMAY-Portable-Monitor-Software-Compat...


This seems to have been part of the Apple Heart Study?


Yes. Abstract talks about iPhone and funding by Apple.

Here is Apple Newsroom https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/stanford-medicine-ann...


does anyone know how informed consent took place for this study? it seems like it would be required, but it also seems really difficult to do at this scale.

i tried to find a mention of it in the abstract or the clinicaltrials.gov entry, but was unable to find it.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: