Five years ago, the Apple Watch might have saved my life

A little more than five years ago, in the early hours of my birthday, no less, I woke up to what I thought was that intense and prolonged alert that the Apple Watch gives you when it’s about to go dead. That wasn’t it. My brush with the ECG alert Apple Watch was actually informing me it had picked up signs of an irregular heart rhythm suggestive of atrial fibrillation. Idiot that I am, I went back to sleep. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t fix it. About 40 minutes later, I gave in and decided to go to the hospital. Upon arriving at the hospital and past triage, I told a very skeptical doctor that my watch had picked up signs of atrial fibrillation. He hooked me up to the big ECG machine whose miniaturized version had already diagnosed me from my wrist, and confirmed it: “Holy crap, you really are in AFib”. The weird thing is that much like what happened to many accidental AFib discoveries I had read about since Apple Watch Series 4 came out with the ECG feature, I didn’t feel sick or o ... Read full article.