The unstoppable advance of new technologies has also led to a revolution in the field of health. Among the multitude of applications and devices capable of monitoring our activity today, smart watches or smartwatches have an advantage, which increasingly incorporate more functionalities in terms of disease prevention .
Many efforts of the designers of these devices are focused on heart ailments, since it is the type of disease that causes the most deaths and the greatest loss of quality of life . Good examples are the Apple Watch models of series 4 and 5, capable of making simple electrocardiograms (ECG) with the electrodes that they incorporate in their rear windows.
When the watch fell into the hands of Miguel Ángel Cobos, a cardiologist at the San Carlos Clinical Hospital in Madrid , he discovered that even more juice could be extracted. Thanks to the method he has devised, three measurements from the smartwatch are enough to achieve results that are practically identical to those obtained by a conventional electrocardiograph, which requires twelve measurements. These correspond to what are known as leads, that is, views of the heart from different angles.
With these guidelines, a device weighing just thirty grams becomes a tool that, in addition to being handy, is as reliable as to diagnose heart attacks . The symptomatic user could quickly transmit their records to a medical professional trained to interpret them.
To perform an autoECG, Cobos proposes to follow these simple instructions:
Lead D1. It is what the device is designed for. We place it on the left wrist and touch the crown with a finger of the right hand. We hold on with this gesture for thirty seconds, and the electro obtained is sent to the mobile.
Lead D2. We put the watch on one leg and press it again with a finger of the right hand. Thus we obtain the information of what is happening in the heart from its upper part to the lower part.
Lead D3. We place the Apple Watch on the left edge of the sternum, in the area where it joins the ribs. With the back of the watch against the chest, we play again with the right hand to obtain a measurement very similar to the D2.
In the future, mobile devices themselves may provide guidance responses on the results of an ECG performed with this method. According to Cobos himself, the artificial intelligence systems would be the ones that would alert users about the need to go to the doctor .
By Mario Ruiz
