hey everybody it’s LAN Simon and we’re doing an update on my Apple watch series for review that I did a few weeks ago because Apple just turned on their new ECG feature that measures your heart rhythm that is different than the heart rate and this feature is unique to the Apple watch series for and what it’s designed to do is detect a condition called afib that puts people at a greater risk of stroke and for a lot of people they don’t know that they have this condition in the first place so the watch might actually be a means of saving lives because people that just randomly try out their part rhythm feature might actually discover they have a condition so we’re going to get it working right now I actually haven’t started the process yet of measuring my ECG so we’re going to do that here on the phone and kind of walk through the steps to get it working so you can see how to make it work on your particular device now do you want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for the watch with my own funds along with the phone that will be used as part of this all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see how this works and the way you activate this feature is to first make sure that your watch on your phone is up-to-date so get those updates installed first after that you go over to the health app and you can see we’ve got this option here to set up the ECG app which is what I’m going to do right now so I’m going to tap on that and it’ll happen now is it will ask for my birthday so I’m going to put that into the phone right now and get going the next step here is to get some information about what it does and it’s telling you exactly what it’s looking
for and whether or not it’s going to detect that atrial fibrillation issue which is also known as a fib and we’ll click continue here and it’s also going to tell us the kinds of things that we might see a sinus rhythm as a result that means the heart is beating in a uniform pattern an afib result means that it’s not beating in a regular pattern and we should get looked at there and it’s also going to measure a low or high heart rate or it might come back as inconclusive now one of the things that’s important to note here is that this does have regulatory approval here in the US but it’s a different type of regulatory approval than what you might have with a certified medical device so the thing they hook you up to at the doctor’s office is more accurate perhaps than what this is going to be so if you’re not feeling well or feel like something’s not right don’t rely on the app to make your health decision go to the doctor where they have much more you know accurate tools to make a more conclusive the decision as to what your condition might be all right next it looks like we’re getting some disclaimers about some of the things that it can’t detect including a heart attack blood clots or a stroke or other heart related conditions so this is specifically an afib detector and nothing more and they want to make sure that you’re aware of that all right so now it looks like we’re ready to take our first ECG so you want to look for this little app icon on your watch we’re going to tap on that real quick that’s going to load up and it’s going to ask me to make sure that the watch is snug on my wrist which I think it is so let’s hit OK here and
then we’re going to I guess have to put my finger against the watch crown here because this is how it does the ECG so there it goes now it’s gonna take about 30 seconds for this to run so I’m gonna let this go and I will come back in a second when it’s done all right so it is now done and it looks like the result is that I have sinus rhythm which means that it did not detect anything out of the ordinary here it’s going to give me some additional information about what it detected and the fact that I do need to call emergency services if I’m not feeling well despite this result I’m going to click on done here because it looks like if we go back to the phone I can get a little more information about what it just discovered so let’s load up the phone and see what we can get out of the health app now alright so after I completed the test I got this waiting for me on my phone I clicked on done and unfortunately the recorder wasn’t going but basically that gets you up and running and now if you go back to your health app on the phone you’ll now see this information appearing with some of your other heart data so if I go back here to heart at the lower portion of the screen there you can see the heart rate that has been measuring all the time but now I
can jump into the electrocardiogram information and dig a little deeper into things so that tests there at the top was the one we just ran so if I tap on that we can get a little bit more data about when it was started when it finished what hardware I was using at the time and then it looks like I can also export a PDF to my doctor which gives her the entire scope of my ECG as it ran so they might be able to do some additional Diagnostics from this if you were having some kind of issue so that’s pretty cool that you can do all this you could just hit the share button there and email it out if you want now this test that we just ran does not run automatically it only runs when you initiate it on the watch and then hold your finger to the crown for 30 seconds to get the reading but the heart rate sensor can also detect irregularities but it won’t be as accurate as the ECG but nonetheless it might be helpful to have that because if you are having an irregular heartbeat you can then go in and run that ECG or seek out medical attention and inside the apple heart are the health app in the heart section you’ll see an option for irregular rhythm notifications and if you go into that and click on set up notifications what this will do is send you a warning when the heart rate sensor notices something out of whack so I’ve got to put my date of birth in here again and then it also is asking me if I’ve ever been diagnosed with afib before and I have actually been diagnosed with it I have an occasional form of it that usually comes with a big thump that I can feel in my chest I’ve been diagnosed I’m treated everything is fine it’s not really life-threatening for me at the moment but it’s something I have to keep an eye on but when I clicked yes to this it wouldn’t let me continue because I think it’s designed for people that have not been diagnosed to maybe nudge them into getting treatment but for people that have the
condition it’s not accurate enough to say whether or not you’re in afib so I’m going to lie to it and just say no so now it’s going to give me some additional information about what it’s looking for it’s going to again check my heart rate to determine if I’m having an irregular rhythm it’s going to do this when I am still to ensure a more accurate reading so if my heart rate is beating faster perhaps than it should when I’m sitting down and relaxed that might be an indicator that something isn’t right so I’m going to click continue here and it’s going to give me a few more things about the heart attack and a-fib not being accurately detected with this particular thing and we’ll click through the rest of these and go on from there we’ll turn on notifications now and I now should be all set to go and hopefully I’ll never get one of those notifications it also apparently keeps track of how many times it happens too so that is pretty helpful so there’s a lot of cool stuff here that you can do with your Apple watch now the heart rate issue the thing we just activated works on prior versions of the watch I think everything after series zero so beginning with the series one watch moving forward the series one was the second edition of the Apple watch the ECG that we just did with the crown and the heart rhythm sensor that is only available on the Apple watch series for that’s the big feature that they
implemented with the new watch so if you don’t have a series 4 you can’t do the ECG but you could probably get that heart rate component to work so I’m very excited about this I think this is going to help a lot of people I’d love for you to get it activated and run a test every once in a while just to make sure that you know whether or not you have this condition because people can get strokes from this even at a young age especially if they don’t know that they have afib and this is a great way to very quickly figure out if you do so run it every month or so just something to keep an eye on how you’re feeling if you’re not feeling well one day maybe a little tired or rundown just run the ECG and just make sure everything is ok it’s painless it doesn’t cost anything it’s part of the watch that you already purchased and I think it’s a great way to keep track of a health condition that could be life-threatening thank you all for watching until next time this is LAN Simon this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold level supporters Chris Allegretto the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht Gerard Newberg in Cali an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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