San Francisco: Apple has armed global researchers with apple watch devices to help explore new frontiers in heart health, the company said Wednesday.
Using the newly released Apple Researcher Support ProgramResearchers can pioneer understanding of the heart with Apple Watch devices.
Apple Watch is currently known to provide heart health features such as high and low heart rate notifications, cardio exercise, irregular rhythm notifications, the ECG app, and atrial fibrillation (AFib) history.
With the new programme, Australian-based pediatric oncologists Associate Professor Rachel Conyers and Claudia Toro are looking at how treatment can affect heart rhythm. “I read about the apple core study and thought this could be important to pediatrics,” Conyers said in a statement.
“We used to think of cardiac toxicity as occurring 10 years after treatment. But now we know that new cancer therapies (such as specific inhibitors or immunotherapy) can cause arrhythmias within 48 hours of medication, for So there’s a big gap in terms of what we know about toxicities right now,” he added.
Conyers and his team at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne will begin by investigating the sensitivity of the Apple Watch ECG app. The study on 40 child and adolescent patients aims to better understand the reality of cardiac toxicity and identify possible opportunities for intervention.
In addition, So-Min Cheong of Texas A&M University and Brian Kim and Marco Perez of Stanford Medicine in the US they plan to use Apple Watch to study the impact of wildfire smoke on heart health. Using the Apple Watch, the team plans to monitor heart rate and rhythm, sleep, blood oxygen, activity data and more on up to 200 firefighters.
“Firefighters will surely benefit from the study,” Cheong said. “We know that wildfire smoke directly affects their health, and with a study like this, they will be able to see their results in real time.” Similarly, researchers at the University of Amsterdam Medical Centers in Europe also aim to use the Apple Watch to detect atrial fibrillation earlier.
The randomized controlled trial will enroll more than 300 patients older than 65 years who meet a risk threshold for atrial fibrillation. AFib is a common heart arrhythmia that can have serious impacts, such as increased risk of stroke or heart failure if left untreated.
“Apple Watch is a widely used and trusted consumer wearable that we thought would be a great device for us to integrate into our research to better understand how we could potentially integrate it into the larger healthcare system,” he said. sebastian blockDirector of eHealth at the Dutch Cardiology Centers.
