What are the best Continuous Heart Monitors, and what's the value of the Apple Watch?

Thank you

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Que
What are the best Continuous Heart Monitors, and what's the value of the Apple Watch?

What data do you want? ECG? Arrhythmia monitoring? Beat to beat heart rate? Averaged heart rate? PAC's & PVC's, afib?

Several manufacturers have smart wearables that will monitor your heart function in real time, but all of them have limited battery life and will need frequent recharging if you need continuous monitoring and feedback. Personally, I use a Galaxy 4 and recently a Galaxy 6 watch, but I only take blood pressure with it first thing upon waking in the am and prior to any significant movement. When I was experiencing AF prior to my second ablation, if I wanted to know for sure, I enabled the sensing app and had to place a forefinger on the 'back' button while it recorded an ECG. But that was obviously on demand, which greatly improved the diurnal longevity of that teensy battery.

My brother-in-law uses a Kardia when he 'wants to know', and it's quite portable. I'm unaware of a continuous function, but I don't have experience with Kardia.

My Galaxy watch has a binary function with ECG. It will detect AF, but if it's iffy, or something else, but not NSR, it will say 'undetermined arrhythmia, consult your doctor'.

Hi George,

I'm interested in learning if I go into Afib and would like continuous monitoring.

Thank you

Quote
Que
I'm interested in learning if I go into Afib and would like continuous monitoring.

Looks like the Galaxy recently got FDA approval to do what you want.

[news.samsung.com]

A search on more.
[www.google.com]

It looks to me like it is using beat to beat variance for this monitoring and if it detects anything asks you to take an ECG with the watch. I'd explore which watches this is available for. I've visually used beat to beat recording for 19+ years to look for afib. This will do that task for you.

Wellue sells a small holter monitor that is worn as a patch on the chest with 2 ecg electrodes. These are $200 on eBay and have been around for a long time. They're actually fairly powerful. You can wear it for 24 hours and it will actually sort all of the rhythms with AI and give you a pretty detailed summary. That is probably the best most affordable option for actual real-time arrhythmia monitoring because the EKG patches will give you a very clear signal with little artifact as there's no cables involved.

The next option would be the 4th frontier. Around $300. It has the limitation of a strap but for having strep the tracing is very good when still. Riding in a car is also good. It has the added advantage of being waterproof can be worn swimming. It will give you a 24-hour EKG to review and it will mark abnormal rhythms but it will not interpret them. It also allows you to press a button to mark events.

If you're looking for diagnosis for water activities it's the only option.

Everything else Wellue holter prob But I've not tested it yet. It's on the way.

Thank you very much!