Skip to main content

Motion-detecting smartphones can discover a deadly quiver in your heart

With innovations in fitness tracking and apps like Apple Health, the smartphone is making inroads into the world of preventative medicine. A team of researchers from Finland is pushing the smartphone even further into this realm developing a smartphone-based method to detect the dangerous and sometimes fatal heart condition of atrial fibrillation.

Atrial fibrillation is a common type of irregular heartbeat in which the heart’s two upper chambers (atria) begin to beat too rapidly. As a result, the heart’s upper and lower chambers (ventricles) fail to work together, causing blood to pool in atria. This can produce blood clots that travel from the heart to brain, where they cause a stroke. The condition is difficult to diagnose since it often occurs for short durations and ends before the person can make it to a doctor’s office or a hospital for an electrocardiogram (ECG) evaluation.

Recommended Videos

Researchers from the Technology Research Centre (TRC), University of Turku, Finland, have developed a smartphone-based method of detecting Atrial fibrillation using a smoothing and specially designed algorithm. Researchers found they could place a smartphone on a patient’s chest while they were lying down and then use the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope, to detect the rapid beating that’s indicative of AF.

“We measure the actual motion of the heart via miniature accelerometers and gyroscopes that are already installed in today’s smartphones,” said lead author Tero Koivisto. “No additional hardware is needed, and people just need to install an app with the algorithm we developed.”

In a trial with 16 atrial fibrillation patients and 20 healthy patients, the smartphone app was able to detect. The atrial method was able to detect atrial fibrillation in 95 percent of the cases. The team hopes doctors and patients will adopt this technology and use it as an affordable way to monitor for atrial fibrillation. The team also foresees a future where a cloud component will store these recording and be utilized for a population-wide analysis of atrial fibrillation cases.

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
Why your eyes deserve an iPad with a ProMotion 120Hz screen
iPad Pro on a desk with AirPods and an iPhone nearby.

Faced with using the Apple iPad Air 5 or the iPad Pro, I choose the iPad Pro every time. The reason is not that the iPad Air 5 is a bad product, far from it. It’s that the iPad Pro has the one major feature missing from it — Apple’s ProMotion 120Hz screen. I’ve been using both the iPad Air and an iPad Pro (2020) for a few weeks now, and the smoother, flicker-free screen on the iPad Pro keeps me coming back to it.
What is ProMotion?
Before we get into why it makes the iPad Pro superior, let’s talk about what the ProMotion 120Hz feature is. It’s Apple’s name for an adaptive screen refresh rate, and the feature is found on some iPad tablets, the iPhone 13 Pro, and the iPhone 13 Pro Max. It dynamically adjusts the screen refresh rate up to 120Hz and down as low as 24Hz on an iPad and 10Hz on the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, resulting in less flicker and smoother animations and scrolling when using the device, along with some power efficiency benefits too.

iPad Pro 2021 Digital Trends

Read more
How to tell if your smartphone has been hacked
Kids playing on a smartphone.

Smartphones have profoundly changed the way people live, communicate with each other, and keep themselves entertained. But like everything else, there's a downside. Corrupt people always want what doesn't belong to them, and devise elaborate criminal methods to get what they want and make everyone else miserable. When thieves hack smartphones, they take more than possessions -- they steal information, money, identity, and -- in some cases -- reputation, all of which can destabilize and endanger the target's health and well-being.

Don't bother expending any effort to identify the hacker. While it's possible to find out who broke into your phone, most of these searches wind up failing. That's because most phone hackers operate on the dark web and behind proxy servers. They specialize in covering their tracks. Most cyberattacks and phone hacks are carried out via malware, anyway, so despite how personal it may feel, mostly it's not personal at all.

Read more
This light bulb can track your sleep and monitor your heart rate from afar
Sengled health monitoring bulb

You may be familiar with smart rings and watches telling you whether you’re getting any deep sleep. Soon, that expertise could extend to a light bulb near you.

In the last few years, advanced medical tools such as ECG monitors, have made their way into all sorts of personal accessories. But if the early days of CES 2022 are any indication, there’s much more yet to come. At CES 2022, smart home device maker, Sengled has offered a glimpse into an upcoming light bulb that can track your sleep and heart rate with radar waves.

Read more