Can Your Fitness Tracker (Fitbit®) Save Your Life in the ER? – YouTube.

Emergency physicians used a patient’s personal activity tracker and smart phone to identify the time his heart arrhythmia started, which allowed them to treat his new-onset atrial fibrillation with electrical cardioversion and discharge him home. The first case report using information in an activity tracker smart phone system to assist in medical decision-making is reported online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine (“Interrogation of Patient Activity Tracker to Assist Arrhythmia Management”).

Read more at the Annals of Emergency Medicine – “Interrogation of Patient Smartphone Activity Tracker to Assist Arrhythmia Management” via Gizmodo.

After seeing the seizure was the cause (using data from the Fitbit) the doctors performed a heart reset, electrocardioversion. Pretty amazing that the team trusted the data on the FitBit, or, they just figured it was another data point for a decision they were considering any way. We’ll see a lot of new things come up as people are tracking and measuring more. Imagine if we could carry around our DNA profiles at all times on our phones and doctors could get a little more data on what medications may or may not work as well (more on that later in tomorrow’s biohacking newseletter).