Fitness wearables typically monitors the wearer’s exercise pattern and activities. Cardiogram announced recently that they have developed an algorithm that trained a deep neural network using heart rate readings taken from Apple Watch, iBeat and Android Wearables to help reduce fatalities caused by heart diseases by detecting atrial fibrillation with higher accuracy than previous models.
Atrial Fibrillation
or AF causes 15% of strokes in cases world-wide. AF is an abnormal heart rhythm
characterized by rapid and irregular beating (arrhythmia) that can lead to
blood clots, stroke, heart failure and other heart-related complications. Normally,
your heart contracts and relaxes to a regular beat. In atrial fibrillation, the
upper chambers of the heart (the atria) beat irregularly (quiver) instead of
beating effectively to move blood into the ventricles. If a clot breaks off, enters the bloodstream
and lodges in an artery leading to the brain, a stroke results. About 15–20
percent of people who have strokes have this heart arrhythmia. This clot risk
is why patients with this condition are put on blood thinners.
Here’s how
patients have described their experience:
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“My heart flip-flops, skips beats, and feels like it’s banging against my chest wall, especially if I’m carrying stuff up my stairs or bending down.”
“I was nauseated, light-headed, and weak. I had a really fast heartbeat and felt like I was gasping for air.”
“I had no symptoms at all. I discovered my AF at a regular check-up. I’m glad we found it early.”
The company sent 200 AliveCor mobile electrocardiogram devices to people diagnosed by this condition and this led to recording of 6,338 mobile ECGs from the test patients. Cardiogram has applied 139 million heart rate readings. To validate their architectural model, Cardiogram obtained gold standards from cardioversions and has been working with medical researchers from UCSF’s Health eHeart Study, and a total of 51 human trials were done wearing the Apple Watch and was able to detect AF with 98.04% sensitivity and 90.2% specificity.
The iBeat smartwatch uses microsensors to measure heart rate for irregularities. The device is integrated with a built-in radio, microphone and GPS. The watch reading shows a user experiencing AF. The iBeat is available for pre-order on iBeat.com. It costs $150 and an additional $17 per month for the monitoring service.
Cardiogram
said that they would eventually roll out wearables to pair early warning with
prompts to set up appointments for the treatment.
When a
cardiac incident is detected, the iBeat vibrates to alert the user, prompting
him or her to touch the screen indicating whether everything is OK. If he or
she responds with “no” or does not reply within 10 seconds, their linked
emergency contacts and iBeat’s 24/7 heart dispatch team receive a text, email
or phone notification with the user’s location and the type of emergency. The
device is cellular enabled, has built-in GPS and features a help on-demand
button.
“There are many devices on the market including diabetic monitors, heart-rate monitors, and other health monitoring solutions, but all these devices only passively monitor you,” Ryan Howard, founder and CEO of iBeat, said in a news release. “None of them actively monitor and analyze your heart health around-the-clock like the iBeat Life Monitor.”
“If you suffer a life-threatening heart incident such as sudden cardiac arrest, you have a 90 percent chance of dying without intervention,” Howard said in the release. “Continual monitoring and quick intervention can mean the difference between life and death in emergency situations.”
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