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by unionjack22 2817 days ago
An EKG is done via a 12-point lead at specific areas of the body. At the moment, there is only one ECG sensor on the watch. When I told my SO who is currently in medical residency, the look on her face was of pure horror. I think to physicians and medical professionals, all this feature will do is to create more false positives and needlessly clog up already stressed clinics with wasteful checkups and add to the number of hypochondriacs.

Maybe through ML Apple could enhance the accuracy and precision of the measurements but given Apple's history with iterating on intelligent features(Siri), it won't happen for a while. If Apple wants to have a meaningful impact on the health of their users, then maybe they ought to use the ECG sharing feature as a means of getting their foot in the door of the medical records industry where their product approach and design rigour is much needed. Moreover, Apple could leverage the ECG feature as part of the product experience to motivate people to engage in activities that get them moving which, at the end of the day, is where most users derive the most value from.
1 comments
briandear 2817 days ago
So the president of the American Heart Association as well as doctors at Stanford are all masking the “horror” of your resident wife?

You know what’s worse than a false positive? A real positive and no way to know about it.

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bennyelv 2816 days ago
On an individual basis, yes. Across a population, not necessarily.

If the false positives result in investigations that carry medical risk then it's possible that on the whole, more harm than good is done.

There's also an interesting consideration around real positives that we've never detected in the past and that never presented any symptoms or negative outcomes. It's possible that we now start detecting cases which previously the patient went their whole life without knowing about and would be totally unaffected by, and introducing medical interventions that have downsides.

How it all stacks up in the end we can't possibly know, but this development isn't automatically "good".

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