atrial fibrillation
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Fitbit gets FDA clearance for its Sense smartwatch and ECG app
Fitbit's Sense smartwatch will be able to detect atrial fibrillation when it arrives in October.
Samsung gets approval for Galaxy Watch Active 2's ECG, but only in Korea
Samsung has received approval for the Galaxy Watch Active 2's ECG feature, but only in South Korea so far.
New York doctor sues Apple over irregular heartbeat detection
The heart monitoring technology inside the Apple Watch may be useful for scientific studies and even saving lives, but one doctor believes it's also straight-up theft. New York University cardiologist Dr. Joseph Wiesel has sued Apple over allegations the Watch violates a patented method for detecting atrial fibrillation. Wiesel claimed that he shared details of the patent with Apple in September 2017, but that the company "refused to negotiate in good faith" and left him no choice but to file a lawsuit.
Stanford study finds Apple Watch can detect irregular heart rhythms
Stanford has released the results of its Apple Watch-based heart study more than a year after it began, and it appears to have been a success, with a few caveats. Only 0.5 percent of the more than 400,000 volunteers received warnings of irregular heart rhythms, but physicians later verified that 84 percent of those notifications were atrial fibrillation episodes and thus potential signs of trouble. To put it another way, the technology both avoided a glut of false positives (a major concern going into the study) and was reliable enough that it was worth a follow-up with doctors.
Your smartphone can now tell you if you have a heart condition
How's the ticker? Some dangerous heart problems can exist without any symptoms whatsoever, like "atrial fibrillation" (A-fib) a type of abnormal cardiac rhythm that affects one in four people. A visit to your physician is normally required to detect it (and is still a must), but a company called AliveCor has just announced that its AFib Dector algorithms have been approved by the FDA for professional or personal use. It consists of the company's $199 heart monitor (also available in an integrated iPhone 5/5s case, shown above) which attaches to an Android or iOS smartphone and rests on your fingers or chest to record your electrocardiogram (ECG). It then sends the info to your smartphone via an ultrasonic signal which is picked up by your phone's microphone, requiring much less power than a Bluetooth system.
Robot surgeon performs world's first unassisted operation
We're sure that more than a few of our readers are keen on robots and interested in the latest developments in robotics, but how many of you would volunteer to be the guinea pig for the world's first unassisted heart surgery? Even though there were about a million doctors on hand to monitor Dr. Carlo Pappone's robosurgeon doing its detailed work on a 34-year-old Italian patient suffering from atrial fibrillation (heart flutters), we can't help but wonder if a juxtaposed "0" and "1" in the bot's code is all it would take to drive a scalpel somewhere that it isn't supposed to go. Luckily for the pioneering patient, the 50-minute surgery went off without a hitch, most likely due to the fact that the prototype bot has software containing data about some 10,000 real-world operations, and has already performed assisted procedures on at least 40 people. Pappone, who initiated and monitored the latest surgery from a computer in Boston while it was occurring in Milan, plans to release a commercial version of the unnamed robosurgeon later this month.[Via PhysOrg]
