Read on for the essentials about the Apple Watch. If you’re ready to extend the iPhone experience to your wrist with apps and notifications, now’s the time: There are plenty of Apple Watch models to choose from, and they get discounted regularly. That means that they’re designed to help you get more out of the Apple products you already own so for example, every Apple Watch has the ability to make your iPhone emit a tone in case it gets lost nearby, and they can also be used to answer phone calls received on the iPhone.

In this case, however, research team was able to sign up a large number of volunteers in just over eight months.Like with most new tech, Apple wasn’t the first to market when smartwatches hit - but true to form, they perfected the technology when they launched the Apple Watch.Īpple Watches do all the things other smartwatches do - they can alert you when you get an email or text message, they can track your daily progress toward fitness goals, and they can act as a remote control for music apps, for starters - but they also integrate perfectly into Apple’s iOS ecosystem of complementary devices. And, once people do enroll, there are additional costs and time needed to accommodate their travel to the study site. Usually, clinical trials struggle to sign up large numbers of participants quickly the process is expensive and time-consuming. The study was conducted virtually, with volunteers talking to the researchers on the phone or through video chat. In the meantime, the study highlights a potential shift toward more efficient, and less costly ways to answer certain scientific questions. That raises concerns about privacy and how well informed people are about how and where their data might be used - questions that remain to be answered. While the data was stored at Stanford, and the Stanford researchers worked with Apple to analyze the information collected, Apple owns the data gathered from the heart app. ”These are people who may stand to benefit from knowing their condition,” he says, since they could then take preventive measures or get treatment to stability their abnormal heart rate. With further confirmation, the app could help identify AFib in people who are not even aware of their condition. But it showed that in a group of people with varying degrees of vulnerability to AFib, an algorithm used in a smartphone-based device could, relatively accurately, pick up the condition.

Turakhia notes that the study doesn’t necessarily suggest that the Apple app could be used to definitively screen everyone for AFib - yet. Because AFib is episodic, and doesn’t occur continuously, this allowed the researchers to compare when the app detected abnormal heart rhythms and when the gold-standard ECG did. These people were then asked to contact the study team, which sent them ECG patches to wear on their chest for up to seven days while still using the app. Over a period of nearly four days, the watch notified 0.5% of this group of potential abnormal heart rhythms. In the NEJM study, the scientists reported results from nearly 420,000 people who already owned Apple Watches and volunteered to participate. 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine, they report that the app’s alerts matched up with electrocardiography, or ECG readings (the gold standard for detecting atrial fibrillation) 84% of the time. Early results of the research project, known as the Apple Heart Study, were presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology last spring. Researchers at Stanford University have been working with Apple to study how accurately the tech giant’s app could detect AFib in a general population.

Iwatch heart monitor