The heart of an average, healthy adult beats more than 100,000 times in just 24 hours! That’s a lot of work for such a small organ, and taking care of it is essential. That’s where the Apple Watch comes in. The Apple Watch is more than just a watch – it’s a powerful tool for monitoring your health. With heart health features like high and low heart notifications, Cardio Fitness, irregular rhythm notifications, the ECG app, and AFib History, the Apple Watch gives you an ever-developing view of your health with actionable insights.
But the Apple Watch isn’t just for personal health monitoring. Since Apple launched ResearchKit and CareKit in 2015, researchers, clinicians, and developers have found innovative new ways to study, track, and treat a broad range of conditions. The Investigator Support Program is the latest addition to this effort, providing researchers with Apple Watch devices to help them break new ground in health research.
A group of researchers from Melbourne, Australia, is using Apple Watch to study the impact of cancer treatments on heart rhythm. Associate professor Rachel Conyers and Dr. Claudia Toro are looking at how treatment can impact heart rhythm and are trying to identify innovative ways to intervene. Using Apple Watch to capture ECGs and monitor their patients’ heart health, they hope to find new ways to improve patient outcomes.
Wildfires have become a growing problem in many parts of the world, and smoke can have serious health consequences. In another study, researchers from Texas A&M and Stanford Medicine are studying the impact of wildfire smoke on heart health in firefighters. Using the Apple Watch, the researchers plan to monitor heart rate, rhythm, sleep, and more in up to 200 firefighters. By better understanding how wildfire smoke affects the heart, they hope to provide tailored interventions to improve the health and safety of firefighters.
At the Cardiology Centers of the Netherlands, researchers are exploring ways to detect atrial fibrillation (AFib) earlier using the Apple Watch’s irregular rhythm notifications. AFib is a common heart arrhythmia that can have serious impacts – such as a higher risk of stroke or heart failure – if left untreated. By enrolling over 300 patients in a randomized controlled study, the researchers hope to better understand how to integrate the Apple Watch into the larger health system.
Within three weeks of the study, researchers were able to identify a participant with AFib in the intervention group who wasn’t experiencing any symptoms.
This study marks the beginning of what they hope to understand using Apple Watch. In the future, they plan to explore ways to identify possible opportunities to use the ECG app to monitor patients from home, as certain medications can alter a heart rhythm. They’re also considering how Apple Watch could be used to monitor heart failure patients from home, given it’s a costly disease, and identify predictive biomarkers for exacerbations.
