At the ER of Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, New Jersey received a 42-year old patient who was suffering from a grand mal seizure along with Atrial fibrillation which is the irregularity of the heart beat.
With both complications together the Doctors at the ER had to make a decision whether to use electric shock to reset the heart rhythm. The use of this procedure had its complications if used without knowing the time of onset of Atrial Fibrillation as the patient was showing no signs and could not recollect it either.
This is where the Fitbit Charge HR, a wrist-worn activity tracker with continuous Heart Rate Monitor. According to the case study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, doctors wrote, “Because the patient was asymptomatic during his current atrial fibrillation event, it was not possible to assign an onset time for his arrhythmia,” the case study also mentioned “The patients Fitbit Charge HR was synchronized with an application on the patient’s smartphone, recording his pulse rate as part of a fitness program.
The application was accessed on the patient’s smartphone and revealed a baseline pulse rate between 70 and 80 beats/min, with an immediate persistent increase to a range of 140 to 160 bpm at the approximate time of the patient’s seizure. … Once the patient’s onset time for his atrial fibrillation was established as three hours before ED presentation, he was considered a candidate for rhythm conversion.”
It can be said that the data from the activity tracker has helped the Doctors get to a proper diagnosis and act in time to decide on the treatment plan. The present symptoms alone cannot help in a proper diagnosis of the underlying chronic conditions which often go unnoticed by the patient, and in this case, it was associated with seizures.
Activity trackers have been used to monitor the users activity and not used as a tool in medical treatment and this might be one of the first cases where the data from an activity tracker has been used to plan the treatment by a clinician in a medical case.
Earlier, the Apple Watch was useful in determining the case of Rhabdomyolysis, which was diagnosed after the user registered abnormally high heart rate on his apple watch, and it is a potentially fatal muscle syndrome that might lead to kidney failure if it was not diagnosed.
