Dr Dave Albert, Cardiologist & founder of Alivecor, demonstrates the Apple Watch ECG prototype from Alivecor with Leslie Saxon MD, Clinical Scholar & Executive Director of the University of Southern California’s Centre for Body Computing at the annual Body Computing Conference being held today in Los Angeles (Twitter hastag to follow is #uscbcc9).
It should be obvious that Patients and Carers around the world are going to love this but it’s still hard to imagine that as a result of the economies of scale and the R&D budgets that only the mobile industry can bring to bear this type of tech might be featured on a smartwatch as powerful as the Apple Watch that costs as little as $7 in just a few short years!
When you see the clumsy remote monitoring boxes being produced by the world’s leading medical device companies (you’ll find plenty of examples over in my “Museum of TeleHealth/Telecare”) isn’t it refreshing to see this latest discrete innovation from Alivecor looking just like the Born Mobile generation would go about designing a cardiac monitoring service?
*** *** UPDATE: 12 October 2015 *** ***
On Twitter I posed the question “What questions will Cardiologists ask in 2022 when $7 buys an ECG & continuous HR monitoring watch?” and the feedback I got from urgent care GP Dr Keith Grimes hit on what I see as being the big issue that we can overcome with just a bit of education:
The reality is we’re already beyond the point of information overload eg. this is what’s really happening every time an endocrinologist fans their face with the Diary that their Patient diligently filled in, this is what’s really happening every time a GP moans about a Patient who has booked an appointment that they deem to be unnecessary, etc.
I loved Dr Dave Albert‘s reply to the question “How are you feeling on you 110th birthday?” but the question I hope we have Cardiologists asking long before 2022 is a question of themselves: Does this Patient need an office visit?
