Physicians in the U.S. are increasingly using Apple Watch as a proven tool for patients to diagnose and manage their own diseases. This is not affected by whether or not you have an official license to use the device to diagnose a specific disease.
One such condition is atrial fibrillation, which is a common arrhythmia. Some American doctors recommend that patients buy at least a budget model of the Apple Watch SE - it allows you to send the data collected by the smartwatch directly to the attending doctor, helping him to constantly monitor the patient's condition and drug intake. Notifications from your Apple Watch about abnormal heart rhythms are sometimes a reason to visit a clinic.
Rod Passman, a professor of medicine and cardiologist in Chicago, described the six-year research program, funded by the National Institutes of Health, involving 85 research centers and Apple across the country. The authors of the study are trying to determine whether Apple Watch data can significantly reduce the amount of time people with atrial fibrillation take blood-thinning medications. Now they are forced to take such drugs constantly, but this is fraught with risks. Perhaps in the future, patients will only take these drugs for 30 days after the condition worsens.
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Many doctors still recommend that patients buy an Apple Watch - a device that can warn of the onset of atrial fibrillation, although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved this feature of the device for patients with a history of the disease. Therefore, the user, when turning on the atrial fibrillation alarm function, must give a negative answer to the question of whether the smartwatch has a history of this disease.
Doctors chose the Apple Watch because of the device's simplicity, affordability, and ubiquity — Apple shipped 40 million smartwatches last year alone. The recommendation to wear an Apple Watch does not cause rejection from the patients themselves, who often ignore the doctor's advice and refuse to take medication or exercise. This has led to an increasing number of large-scale studies to determine new purposes for the use of the device. Scientists have shown that the Apple Watch is suitable for determining people's stress levels, tracking recovery after surgery, and monitoring the health of children's hearts. It's worth noting that none of the scientific papers published by researchers in recent years on new use cases for the Apple Watch have come from Apple itself.
Even with Apple's wide range of features, turning the device into a full-fledged medical diagnostic tool is not that easy. First of all, due to the lack of accuracy of some of the sensors that the company plans to add to smartwatches. Second, Apple has been forced to disable certain features – including Masimo – due to patent claims, and its dispute over the pulse oximeter remains unresolved. But constant monitoring with your Apple Watch allows you to collect a lot of data that could be useful.
A well-known example is Ruud Koster, a 72-year-old Dutch doctor who has been a cardiologist for 50 years. One day, after a workout at the gym, he checked an electrocardiogram (ECG) made by his Apple Watch and found hidden signs of ischemia. He felt no discomfort or other symptoms and continued with an ECG for the next hour, only to insist that he needed to see a doctor. Soon after, he underwent bypass surgery to repair the artery. Dr. Coster described his case in a report. At the same time, he admitted that the Apple Watch also has false positives, so a large number of citizens can go to medical institutions for no reason and undergo expensive tests that they don't really need. This is one of the reasons why regulators conduct a review of medical devices before allowing manufacturers to make claims about their capabilities.
The research project, led by Dr. Parsman, has been running for 10 months. Apple engineers are helping scientists, in particular, they give them direct access to sensors, which are not available to ordinary developers who create applications for watches and iPhones. Once upon a time, Apple had only one part-time doctor, but today it has an entire department of cardiologists and heart rhythm specialists. However, Dr. Passman stressed that there should be a limit to what companies can and should do when it comes to adding logic to the device – in this project, Apple's role is to provide the data to the researchers, and it is up to the medical professionals to decide what to do with it.
In order to move in this direction, Apple will have to continue looking for new types of sensors so that they work no less reliably than existing ones, and their appearance no longer causes patent wars. There is a need for research device users to share data about themselves, which will be processed by an automated evaluation system. Apple alone cannot cope with this situation - the use cases of the watch must be developed by doctors and researchers.