The heart rate monitor on the Apple Watch 6 could lead to unwanted medical trips, according to a new study published this week. Nearly 10 percent of those who visited a doctor at the Mayo Clinic after they noticed a bad read of beans on their watches found heart disease.
The findings suggest that home-based medical surveillance equipment could lead to widespread use of the health care system, said research author Heather Heaton, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. in an email to The Verge. It can cost a lot of money for the whole patient and the system, and it can take a lot of time for the doctor and the patient.
Heaton and the research team examined patient health records at Mayo Clinic locations, including offices in Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa, for pronouncing the word “Apple Watch” for six months from December 2018 to April 2019. the window came just after Apple introduced a feature to detect the rhythms of its unsuspecting heart following the release of a study that follows the merits of the watch watch.
Apple Watch 6 heart monitor
They found records of 264 deaths claiming that their Apple Watches represented the rhythm of the heart. Of that group, 41 clear statements were obtained from the watch from their watch activity (others may have been alert, but not mentioned in their medical records). Half of the patients had been diagnosed with cancer, including 58 previously diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. Approximately two-thirds of symptoms, including light or chest pain.
Only 30 patients in the study found symptoms of respiratory distress after their doctor’s visit. Much of the information about cardiac screening, perhaps, is potentially harmful, the study concluded. The disadvantages, even if the patient’s health is declining, can be serious: they can push patients away without the need for health care to relieve stress and anxiety. Even people without symptoms, such as some people in this study, may still feel the need to talk to a doctor about a different flag on a device such as the Apple Watch.
“It’s hard for a user to pay attention to a warning that they have a serious illness,” Kirk Wyatt, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Mayo Clinic and author of the study, says in his email. to the Verge.
Some of these features are not new. For years, doctors have been watching patients come to their offices after researching medical conditions online, Heaton said. Smartwatches, though, monitor people without finding a mate. And Apple isn’t the only company flagging users and what it collects is like a different heartbeat: The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is an EKG feature, just like Fitbit’s Sense smartwatch. Despite the percentage of people who receive different heart readings on one of these devices below (a survey of the Apple Watch 6 found that less than 1 percent of users watch), millions of people use it these results – so thousands more people can still go to the doctor on their own.
These types of products “darken the line between highly researched medical devices and life-saving devices,” Wyatt says. People may not understand how well they do and why they are used to you. People who have been diagnosed with a genetic disorder, for example, do not claim to use the Apple Watch 6 device – but more than 20 percent of the population in the Mayo Clinic survey has already resolved that loss. The feature is not intended to be used by anyone under 22 years of age, but nearly twenty people with records in the survey are below that fraction.
Smartwatches may be a useful way for people to monitor their own health, at home, but it is still unclear what the benefit will be for them. Much of the research done on the Apple Watch, for example, focuses on the ability to detect a ground object, but does not find it useful to use it as a surveillance tool in the context of the system health care. Without that information, doctors like Heaton would be concerned that devices could be confused with devices because they are not fully needed. “Understanding the context and nuances of the disease is important, at this point it is not fully understood by the medical device it holds,” he says.
Source: The verge