[dpatrick86]

It really sounds like a software issue to me. If the watch is causing atrial fibrillation to be detected too often, then you can either make the software meet some greater threshold before alerting the user.. or, even better, determine more fully formed diagnostic criteria to be applied.

The fact that medicine hasn't studied whether or not healthy hearts are regularly doing this because sensors were inconvenient previously, doesn't mean we need to get rid of the sensors. It means that both the presentation of the software should have some sort of feedback loop from clinical research that should emerge as a consequence of that data now... existing.

[esalman]

> you can either make the software meet some greater threshold

That will, on the other hand, increase false negatives. I think that will defeat the whole purpose of putting the sensor in the watch.

> medicine hasn't studied whether or not healthy hearts are regularly doing this because sensors were inconvenient previously

Medicine has studied this. It is just that this specific kind of diagnosis is subjective and there are a lot of debate.

The main point, from what I understood, the author is arguing is that the one-lead EEG of the Apple watch is prone to higher false positives, and users should take it with a grain of salt.

[Kliment]

The way I read it, applying something with a nonnegligible false positive rate to a much larger population (that is, screening everyone without indications) will lead to many incorrect diagnoses because your error rate is multiplied by a large healthy population. Whereas applying diagnostic tests only to people with suspected a-fib gives you a smaller group with a higher base rate of what you're looking for, so false positives are not as much of a problem.