Apple Watch opens up new frontier for heart health research

Apple has continually set new standards of health and fitness tracking with the inception of the Apple Watch, back in 2015. With heart health features — including high and low heart notifications, Cardio Fitness, irregular rhythm notifications, the ECG app, and AFib History — Apple gives users an ever-developing view of their health with actionable insights.

Since Apple launched ResearchKit and CareKit in 2015, researchers, clinicians, and developers have found innovative new ways to study, track, and treat a broad range of conditions. To further drive discoveries that improve health at scale, Apple launched the Investigator Support Program. Through this program, Apple provides researchers with Apple Watch devices, enabling them to break new ground in health research, including the scientific understanding of the heart.

Associate professor Rachel Conyers and Dr. Claudia Toro are senior pediatric oncologists from Melbourne, Australia, primarily spending their days caring for children in a tertiary pediatric oncology clinic and researching toxicities related to children’s cancer therapies within the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. Together they are looking at how treatment can impact heart rhythm and are trying to identify innovative ways to intervene.

In the coming months, Dr. Conyers and her team at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute will begin with researching the sensitivity of the Apple Watch ECG app in 40 children and adolescent patients. From there, the team will look for ways for patients to take their ECGs wherever they are, whenever they’re able. With those insights, the team hopes to better understand the reality of cardiac toxicity and identify potential opportunities for intervention.

Besides the collaboration with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Apple is also working with researchers at Texas A&M University (Dr. So-Min Cheon) and at Stanford Medicine (Drs. Brian Kim and Marco Perez) to study the health of firefighters. The pair will conduct research on the impact of wildfire smoke on heart health. Over 200 firefighters from Texas and California will be offered an Apple Watch for the study.

Apple is also working with the Amsterdam University Medical Centers to explore ways to detect AFib earlier. The researchers have developed a randomised controlled study as part of a larger initiative called HartWacht, the first reimbursable eHealth concept. As part of their study, they plan to enrol more than 300 patients over the age of 65 who meet a risk threshold for AFib. Half of the participants — the intervention group — will wear Apple Watch for at least 12 hours per day. Check out our full review of the Apple Watch Series 8 here.