Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikekij | Hacker News Reader

This is good to know! I'm still genuinely curious how many false positives this leads to.

It will be interesting to see, but they ran that study for year and a half or more (listed in article) collecting data based on the old watch is probably to try to see how well they could detect afib just from the heart rate sensor.

Apple is a big rich company, but I imagine their lawyers wanted to make sure they were REALLY sure they weren’t about to screw themselves over with tens of thousands of lawsuits, above and beyond the FDA requirements.

You sure do put a lot a faith into a $500 watch. I routinely see $40000 cardiac monitors spit out false positives Ie. actute MI or Afib with RvR on healthy patients in the field.

It’s not supposed to be in the same category. That’s why doesn’t worry me. All they have to do is not generate too many false positives and maybe help a few people out.

It certainly not designed to replace a REAL device at a doctors office/hospital for diagnostic purposes.

And this watch is not supposed to be perfect, nor replace medical devices. If it works well it will be an added benefit to the user, and could alert users about heart issues (and has done so!)

I think the ratio of true to false positives is vastly more interesting and an indicator for how well the technology is performing and if the burden is reasonable or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com