Can your Apple Watch help prevent a heart attack? Surprisingly, the short answer is, it seems likely that the Apple Watch may help predict a coming heart attack so that preventative measures can be taken.

Christina Farr, writing for KQED Science:

We could send an alert to someone who is soon to have a stroke or heart attack if we do enough measurements of an ECG and we gather other data points about that person.

At my company, AliveCor, we are working to deskill the process of determining characteristics of Arrhythmia’s [an irregular heart beat]. On our app today, we have an FDA-approved algorithm that can detect the presence of Atrial fibrillation [an irregular, often rapid heart rate that can cause poor blood flow]. We are also logging the context around it: How is it linked to coffee consumption or stress?

In the next few years, I believe that the industry will be able to spot the characteristics of someone who’s likely to have a heart attack in the next three days.

The whole article is fascinating. Between the heartbeat sensor on the Apple Watch and the crowd-sourcing brought to the table by ResearchKit, Apple has pushed the practical side of medicine forward in a truly significant way.