Are mobile health devices accurate for the early diagnosis and screening of atrial fibrillation?
Mobile health devices offer a feasible and highly accurate method for systematic mass screening and early diagnosis of atrial fibrillation, though more comparative studies are needed.
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia in adults. AF increases the risk of heart failure, cardiac ischemic disease, dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Either clinical and subclinical AF increase the risk of stroke and worsen the patients' clinical outcome. The early diagnosis of AF episodes, even if asymptomatic or clinically silent, is of pivotal importance to ensure prompt and adequate thromboembolic risk prevention therapies. The development of technology is allowing new systematic mass screening possibilities, especially in patients with higher stroke risk. The mobile health devices available for AF detection are: smartphones, wrist-worn, earlobe sensors and handheld ECG. These devices showed a high accuracy in AF detection especially when a combined approach with single-lead ECG and photoplethysmography algorithms is used. The use of wearable devices for AF screening is a feasible method but more head-to-head comparisons between mHealth and medical devices are needed to establish their comparative effectiveness across different study populations.
A 2022 study studied this question.