AFib monitoring for lower cost with longer battery life.
The ancestors of today's best fitness trackers and smartwatches may have been little more than tiny buzzers and step-tracking innovations, but we always knew they had the potential to save lives and help us identify serious problems before they became irreversible. Last month, Google highlighted its work with machine learning algorithms to advance healthcare, and now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has begun rolling out a new algorithm to Fitbit devices that will be even more effective at identifying people with atrial fibrillation. (AFib) is one of the leading signs that a person is at risk of having a stroke.
This isn't Fitbit's first success story in the fight against irregular heart rhythms. In 2020, Fitbit was granted legal permission for an app that could be used to perform on-site checks. Users can start a test and remain still for approximately 30 seconds while the built-in PPG (photoplethysmography) optical heart rate sensor takes measurements and gives a reading.
The new algorithm goes a step further by automating the testing procedure to take regular measurements while you sleep or rest. By increasing the regularity of tests and extending them to different hours of the day, the probability of detecting occasional episodes of AFib is greatly increased.
PPG works by measuring the size of blood vessels in your body. Each heartbeat causes the vessels to expand and contract as blood is pushed through the body. It is possible to identify signs of atrial fibrillation by monitoring irregularities in this pattern.
In a five-month study of 455,699 participants during 2020, Fitbit found that it was able to successfully identify AFib 98% of the time and was 100% accurate in identifying participants with normal sinus rhythm.
Fitbit is preparing to roll out a new feature called Irregular Heart Rate Notifications based on its algorithm. This will be useful for alerting users to potential problems; When used in conjunction with the existing ECG application to perform on-site checks and record a trace, it is possible to provide healthcare professionals with more data they can use to reach early diagnosis.
The Irregular Heart Rate Notifications feature will only be available in the US until regulatory approval is granted in the EU and other countries. Fitbit's blog post stated that the feature will only be available on "a range of heart rate-enabled devices," but it wasn't clear whether it will be available on existing devices or only newer models. However, the ECG app has basically been rolled out to all compatible hardware and this monitoring feature is likely to work on all the same hardware. When this becomes available, it will match the AFib tracking capabilities currently available on later models of the Apple Watch.
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