A Philadelphia doctor credits her Apple Watch with saving her life after it alerted her that she was suffering from a dangerous heart condition.
Erica Harris, 43, was stuck in traffic in November 2021 when she received an alert on her watch that her heart was beating too fast and irregularly, indicating what could be a dangerous condition of rapid atrial fibrillation (Afib).
The emergency doctor used her hands to press down on her chest to increase pressure on her heart, which caused her organ to return to its normal rhythm, she said. The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“He had been like that for almost five minutes, which is the point at which you are at risk for a stroke,” he said. At that point, he had no physical indication that his heart was beating irregularly.
The doctor was born with a congenital heart defect that required her to undergo two surgeries, so after receiving the alert she contacted her cardiologist, who prescribed anticoagulant medications to use in case of a new attack of atrial fibrillation, the media reported.
While smartwatches aren’t 100 percent correct all the time and aren’t recommended after medical review, they have alerted some patients to medical events who otherwise wouldn’t have known.
Erica Harris, 43, was stuck in traffic in November 2021 when she received an alert on her watch that her heart was beating too fast and irregularly, indicating what could be a potentially dangerous condition of rapid atrial fibrillation.
Her watch gave her an urgent alert and she was able to press her hands to her chest to get her heart back into a normal rhythm. Harris, who was born with a heart condition, later went to her cardiologist and was prescribed blood thinners to take if the episode happened again.
Up to 30 percent of American adults wear smartwatches with health tracking capabilities, according to Evolution of care.
Nora Bursztein, 74, was one of those patients who, like Harris, received an urgent alert informing her that her heart rate was at 48 beats per minute when it was normally 60 or 70.
“I ignored it, thinking maybe it was the watch,” he told The Inquirer.
She received the alert a few more times over a couple of days and after trying her daughter’s watch and noticing a lower heart rate, she began to wonder if something was wrong.
“The next day I had surgery,” he said. He was fitted with a defibrillator and a pacemaker.
The American Heart Association recommends that users seek medical attention if they receive an alert from their watch. Patients can get an electrocardiogram (ECG) at a doctor’s visit to check their heart rhythm and determine if there is actually a medical problem.
However, smartwatches can be life-saving tools and can detect trends that patients would otherwise not have known about.
An Apple Watch can notify the user if the heart rate is high or low and can indicate if the heart rhythm is abnormal. It records the data in the app, which can then be shown to a doctor for further evaluation.
But users should keep in mind that the watch is not a medical device and that external circumstances can affect the data collected, making it inaccurate. About 20 percent of alerts are false, according to The Inquirer.
“We need to be sure we have an accurate diagnosis,” cardiologist Stavros Stavrakis told The Inquirer.
In November 2022, a team of doctors found that resting heart-related information collected by smartwatches was about 90 percent accurate. That figure drops to 70 percent during activity.
However, it’s very rare to receive an urgent alert from a smartwatch: less than one percent receive them, according to research.
Only three to five percent of people over age 65 receive an alert about an irregular heart rhythm, Stavrakis said.
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