| This is a combination of posters not understanding what the technology is used for and the tech guy exaggerating the urgency of the situation. Remote cardiac monitoring isn't for people who are imminently going to die of catastrophic heart attacks or who risk dropping into a fatal arrhythmia (wonky heart rhythm). In fact, there isn't even solid evidence that it saves lives. What it is used for is investigating patients who have vague symptoms which might be related to transient changes in their heart beat. These are people who come to their doctor at the age of 54 and say "I felt my heart beating really quickly and felt kind of faint" or "I felt kind of dizzy and then passed out. It's happened twice in the last month." The more traditional way to investigate these patients are with what's called a Holter monitor, as alluded to by a previous poster. These are little belt packs you carry around while wired-up and that record your ECG for 24-48 hours at a time. The main weakness? You said it: the device only has a 24-48 hour windows to capture the weird, often rare, rhythm. There are different ways remote cardiac monitoring systems report their results and I'm not sure which this particular company was using, but it doesn't really matter. Some of them only report weird stretches, others only report events when the patient says they're feeling symptom X, others are reporting continuously. Take-home message: this is not life-or-death data. When doctors (at least those who are allowed to keep practicing) think a patient needs critical cardiac monitoring, they admit them to hospital. This was a tech guy, looking to jump the queue by trying to raise a red flag because his servers were being used for--OMFG!--cardiac monitoring. A lot of my doctor buddies use similar strategies when they're caught speeding by the police. "I just got called in to the hospital!" …to see a patient with a really nasty rash. |