Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a condition that affects over five million Americans. For people over the age of 65, it is the most common diagnosis when they are hospitalized. One in nine deaths has heart failure as a contributing cause, as per Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Smartwatches might soon come to the rescue.
Experts at Tampere University have developed a new smartwatch-based method for detecting congestive heart rate failure. As part of a multi-disciplinary research that involved heart health and machine learning experts, the team created a real-time analysis method that works with smartwatches and heart rate monitors.
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Heart diseases usually follow a signature pattern of cardiac activity, and their careful analysis by an expert can help detect signs of serious problems. Take for example AFib detection, which looks for signs of irregular heartbeat rhythm using electrocardiogram (ECG) data.
The team is applying a similar tactic for diagnosing CHF in patients, relying on the insights gleaned from inter-beat or RR intervals. The RR interval is representative of the length of a ventricular cardiac cycle.
In the context of an electrocardiogram, it represents the time gap between two successive R-waves on an ECG graph. The team measured the accuracy of their method against a control set of healthy folks and people living with atrial fibrillation (AFib) problems.
As per the research paper that was published in the Heart Rhythm O2 journal, smartwatches can detect signs of congestive heart failure with impressive accuracy. The system is not only convenient and cost-effective, but can also help detect the onset of a serious cardiac problem and save lives.
“This approach highlights the potential of non-invasive, cost-efficient RRI analysis for early detection of CHF (congestive heart failure) and AF (atrial fibrillation),” concludes the research paper. As far as measurement accuracy goes, the method achieved 90% sensitivity and 92% specificity in detecting heart failure and AFib markers.
Last year, the same team developed a smartwatch-based computation method that can predict the risk of death from sudden cardiac arrest using a minute’s worth of heart rate measurement on a smartwatch.
“Our findings pave the way for the early detection of congestive heart failure using readily available equipment, eliminating the need for complex diagnostic procedures,” says Professor Jussi Hernesniemi, a cardiologist at Tays Heart Hospital.
The latest breakthrough is just the latest in a series of promising smartwatch-based research. In just a decade, smartwatches have transformed from digital companion devices to serious health-sensing powerhouses.
We already have smartwatches out there that measure blood pressure and look for signs of sleep apnea, while capabilities such as blood glucose monitoring are also on the horizon. Earlier this year, another research highlighted how smartwatch data can help accurately detect psychiatric illnesses and also trace their roots to a person’s unique genes.