People love wearables and smartwatches right now, like the Apple Watch. Not only can these kinds of watches tell time, but they can also do a host of other things, such as monitoring your health.
In particular, the Apple Watch will let you stay connected to calls, texts, and notifications, even if you don’t have your iPhone with you nearby. If you need to listen to music and podcasts, this watch also provides the functionality. It’s also the perfect companion for outdoor adventures as it features maps to help you navigate.
When it comes to helping you stay on top of your health, Apple Watch never fails. It allows you to track your workouts to meet your fitness goals and monitor aspects of your health, such as your heart rate.
This is precisely what Apple Watch did to a 29-year-old woman from Cincinnati, Ohio when the device alerted her that her heart rate was abnormally spiking while she was asleep before she learned that there was a fatal blood clot in her lungs. Following are the details of this news.
The woman, Kimmie Watkins, said she had lately been feeling lightheaded and tired quite often, but she could not pinpoint why. One day, she decided just to sleep it off, thinking doing so would ease the pain and relieve her, as she thought what she’d been feeling lately may just be because she had been skipping meals.
But she also kept her Apple Watch worn while asleep, so the watch was able to map her heartbeat throughout.
After just around an hour and a half from when she dozed off, her Apple Watch awoken Watkins, alerting her that her heartbeat had been abnormally too high for an extended period.
Her Apple Watch indicated that her heart rate spiked to 178 beats per minute, which is too high for someone at rest or asleep and not doing rigorous physical activities.
To track a person’s heart rate, Apple Watch utilizes green LED lights paired with light-sensitive photodiodes to read the amount of blood flowing through their wrist at any given time. As the heart beats, blood flows to the wrist, and the green light absorption is more excellent, letting the Apple Watch inform them about their heart rate.
Watkins did not take her smartwatch’s notification with a grain of salt. Instead, she followed its warning and sought help from her doctor. Her physician diagnosed her with a saddle pulmonary embolism (SPE), a condition characterized by blood clotting in the lungs, which is deadly if left untreated.
According to the National Institutes of Health, SPE is a rare kind of acute pulmonary embolism that can lead to sudden hemodynamic collapse and, eventually, death. Some of its symptoms are the sudden onset of shortness of breath, lightheadedness, rapid heartbeat, and coughing up blood, among others.
“It might be seen as staying too connected or something, but I think [the Apple Watch] can be helpful in a health sense, and not just in a connect to people sense,” Watkins told local news outlets.
