Study Finds That The Apple Watch Can Be Used To Assess Frailty

The Apple Watch comes with a bunch of features built into it that are related to health. This includes a heart rate sensor, an ECG monitor, a blood oxygen monitor, and so on. Those tools are rather straightforward in what they can do, but a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Stanford, they have found that the Apple Watch can do more than that.

According to the study, the researchers found that the Apple Watch has the potential to be used as a remote tool to measure and assess a patient’s frailty. For those who are unfamiliar the term, frailty in the medical sense is used to define patients who are older and have a high risk of things happening to them such as falling, being admitted to hospitals, the need for long-term care, and so on.

This is measured by getting patients to walk where if they are unable to travel a distance of 300 meters in less than 6 minutes, they would be considered as frail. To see if the Apple Watch can be used in this method, the researchers used an Apple Watch and an iPhone 7 with a custom-made VasTrac app to help passively collect data that would be used for analysis.

From what they found in their study, which involved 110 patients who were scheduled for vascular or cardiac procedures, the researchers concluded that the Apple Watch has the ability to be used as a tool to help measure and assess a person’s frailty remotely. However, like we said, the study only involved 110 patients which isn’t exactly a large number, so it can hardly be considered conclusive, but at the same time it does show some potential that could be further investigated.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Gadgets, Medical
Tags: Apple Watch, Health, Smartwatch, study, Wearable Tech