Smartwatch

Samsung Galaxy Watch 4

I have atrial fibrillation (commonly called afib). My heart beat is irregular and sometimes very fast. That's what put me in the hospital 20 years ago. They gave me some drugs and my heart slowed down, but it's still irregular. I'm still taking the drugs. Seems like I am getting worn out more easily these days. It could just be because I am getting old, but rumor has it that some of these drugs might be slowing me down. I wanted to see if my heart was always being flaky, or whether it might sometimes revert to a normal rhythm, so I looked at heart monitors. I was looking for one that could record my heart beat for extended periods, but the more I looked, the less I found. Lots of Smartwatches offer heartrate monitoring, but most of them are for people with normal heart rhythms, you know, exercise fanatics. This Samsung watch will record a rudimentary electro-cardiogram which is step up from simply counting the number of beats. It was only $70, so I thought I would give it a shot.

Samsung 30 second ECG

The watch makes the recording, sends it as a PDF to my Samsung smartphone via Bluetooth, I 'share' it via email but don't send it. Now the mail is in my gmail drafts folder. Open this message on my desktop, download the file to my computer. Open the file, take a screenshot, edit it to remove the extraneous noise and then insert it in this blog post.

I have made a half a dozen recordings and they all show an irregular heartbeat.

Then I come across this cool video on YouTube:

Your Smartwatch is even more incredible than you think
Steve Mould