Apple products are cool. I love them.
But (even) Apple will struggle delivering health.
Making healthy people healthier is fraught with problems.
At the core of this issue are the many snags of screening people for disease.
Here are 600 words I wrote for Medium: I’m a Heart Doctor. Here’s Why I’m Wary of the New Apple Watch
Here are my thoughts in the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-adds-heart-monitoring-fall-detection-features-to-its-watch-1536792518
And the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/14/what-cardiologists-think-about-apple-watchs-heart-tracking-feature/?utm_term=.3dd8d07c74f0
And The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/09/the-new-apple-watchs-heart-monitoring-is-complicated/570115/
And MarketWatch: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-watch-wants-to-monitor-your-hearts-health-and-cardiologists-say-it-could-make-you-worry-instead-2018-09-13
Even Slashdot: https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/09/14/2125223/what-cardiologists-think-about-the-apple-watchs-heart-tracking-feature
My colleague Patrice Wendling from theheart.org |Medscape Cardiology captured some of my positive comments on the watch: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/902018
If you like academic prose, here is an editorial I co-wrote on AF-screening for the influential medical journal, JAMA-Internal Medicine: Screening for Atrial Fibrillation Comes With Many Snags
JMM
Also … You can hear my thoughts on the five top cardiology stories each week on my podcast: This Week in Cardiology. The link on iTunes is here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/this-week-in-cardiology/id991125169?mt=2
Mike Nall says
I’ve had the AliveCor device for nearly 5 years as a participant in the initial compilation of ecgs that was used to develop the algorithms. I’ve had ecgs from the device flagged as Afib. For this whole time I’ve also had a dual chamber pacemaker that will record Afib. The events recorded and flagged by the AliveCor were bigeminal PVCs. Even I could tell that, but it still concerned me at the time. I think these Apple devices will create a flood of people contacting cardiologists with problems that do not exist