How Fitness Technology Can Detect Disease

Medically reviewed by

Dr. Rosmy Barrios, MD

Dr. Rosmy Barrios, MD is an aesthetic medicine specialist whose work focuses on patients who are treated for obesity, metabolic syndrome, and other weight-related issues through nutritional analysis, keto diet programs, and supporting medications.

Updated May 13, 2018 by

Allison Lee

Allison is a freelance writer, fitness enthusiast, and long-time advocate of the ketogenic lifestyle. Once overweight, she contributes her success in losing over 75 lbs to both a low-carb, high-fat diet and moderate exercise. Residing in Tacoma, Washington, Allison enjoys getting out to explore the Pacific Northwest with her two children and taking in baseball games on lazy Sunday afternoons.

News, Technology

Photo by Tom Sharrow/SoNourished.com

Wearable technology has some distinct advantages when it comes to monitoring our fitness and our health. However, what many wearers don’t recognize yet is that wearable devices, like the Apple Watch and Fitbit, hold the power to keep us informed about diseases as well.

Without the need for additional accessories, the Apple Watch is fully capable of detecting diseases, like atrial fibrillation, tachycardia, and other heart rhythm disorders. According to the Cardiogram app, which conducted a study using heart tracking data from Apple Watch, the device could also provide insight into alerting about other diseases, like sleep apnea, high blood pressure, and even diabetes.

The mRhythm Study

Using Cardiogram’s DeepHeart app, which integrates with Apple Watch, Android Wear, and Fitbit, researchers are able to tap into over 200 million health measurements each year contributed by over 14,000 users. Though the sheer volume of data is far larger than any team of doctors could effectively assess on a routine basis, DeepHeart seeks to use artificial intelligence to detect patterns that could better identify the occurrence of common diseases, including atrial fibrillation, hypertension, sleep apnea, and diabetes.¹

Detection Through Data

So how is an app that only monitors heart rate and step count able to determine if you’re at risk for a life-threatening disease? Surprisingly, it’s all determined by patterns – whether beat to beat patterns that assess arrhythmia, or heart rate fluctuations during resting or active states.

For those at risk for diabetes, it’s common to have a slower heart rate recovery after exercise and a more rapid resting heart rate. The DeepHeart app monitors these patterns and compares them against a standard that has been assessed through ongoing study and routine monitoring of data collected from all users. Similar patterns are present for diseases like sleep apnea and hypertension as well.²

Retaining Users

One of the biggest challenges faced by those developing the DeepHeart app was retaining users. In the health app space, it is common to see over 90 percent of users drop off from using a monitoring app within the first 90 days.³ In order to improve retention and increase engagement with the app, developers set standards for interaction with the app – issuing mobile alerts that would be helpful to users, coupling those alerts with positive feedback to encourage users, and keeping the interface simple and updated often, so that users would be encouraged to check their data more often.

With the attention to keeping a user’s focus while providing valuable insights into their health and wellbeing, the team at Cardiogram has increased engagement with their users five times more than other mobile health monitoring apps. The theme in tech has shifted toward health and fitness, with many of the major tech providers – like Apple, Samsung, FitBit, and Android – making great strides to provide more useful and usable devices make us more aware of our health status. Companies like Cardiogram are likely the first step toward major improvements in the health tech space and a positive step forward for those seeking more insight into their well-being.

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Dr. Rosmy Barrios, MD

This article has been medically reviewed by Dr. Rosmy Barrios, MD.