I don’t know if you are qualified but I’m a MD with a PhD in neuroscience and I work full time as a researcher and publish between 10 and 20 papers like that every year. I write messages on this forum very rarely but this time I felt compelled to reply due to my professional competence in the field. I like Apple, I have half a dozen apple devices, including the Apple Watch and I like all of them. However this article IS MISLEADING and I don’t think this case should be used to promote the Watch. It’s bad journalism. The Apple Watch detects spikes in the heart rate, that’s it. It’s not a certified device because no studies have been made until now. It is extremely likely that the Apple Watch at the present state would identify a huge number of false positives. The guy in the story went to a doctor in response to an alarm triggered by the Watch. The doctor found SOMETHING ELSE and treated the other condition that might have been potentially fatal. The article doesn’t clarify this point well enough. What happened it’s like if a person etas too much and has stomach pain. Then goes to the doctor and cancer is discovered. It’s luck!
That doesn’t mean that the Apple Watch can’t be useful but there is no need to mislead the public, which may be dangerous. The predictive variable for arrhythmias (not myocardial infarction), BTW, is not the hearth rate but the hearth rate variability (HRV). It’s not clear to what extent, if at all, the Watch measures it and how it uses it. If Apple is doing scientific research on that, it’s certainly a good thing but we need to wait for scientific evidence published on scientific journals. For now, there is none.
This is my google scholar page if you are interested:
http://scholar.google.it/citations?user=8OAhU64AAAAJ&hl=it
Regards
V.