From Nature, 14 October 2026:
Wearable devices that can track health data offer a promising new research frontier, but a journal case study published in 2020 illustrates one of their core problems.
The study describes a 70-year-old woman with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation — bouts of fast, irregular heartbeat that can be symptomatic or silent. This form of atrial fibrillation often resolves without treatment, but because of the patient’s other risk factors for stroke, her doctors put her on anticoagulant medication to lower the chance of a deadly blood clot.
The patient wore a smartwatch that included an app for monitoring heartbeat and generating electrocardiogram (ECG) readouts. In the year following her diagnosis, she checked those ECG readouts 916 times. She turned up to one consultation with her electrophysiologist — clinicians who specialize in arrhythmia — with a printed stack of those ECGs, according to Lindsey Rosman, who co-authored the paper describing the case.
“When I say stack, I mean hundreds,” says Rosman, a clinical health psychologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Read more.
