Has anyone used a home heart monitor such as the Alivecor Kardia, or BP machine which detects AF to assist with diagnosis?
Do you regularly use any of these devices for reassurance?
We will soon be issuing a survey on these devices, but in the meantime, if anyone would like to share their thoughts, please email me on r.harris@heartrhythmalliance.org
Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you!
Rachel - AF Association - Patient Services Associate
Hello Rachel 
I have an Omron M3 which I purchased to monitor my blood pressure.
It has a simple 'irregular heartbeat' symbol which has worked on some occasions when I knew my heartbeat to be irregular but at other times it gave an 'error message' or said I had moved, this was not surprising considering during some episodes I was shaking violently as my BP fluctuated wildly . On one occasion my BP measured 210/109 pulse 155 then plunged to 119/90 .
I have had the monitor check for accuracy by my GP who uses a similar one.
There is a more expensive model which may be better suited to checking for an irregular heartbeat.
I took the meter with me to the arrhythmia clinic when I was trying to get a diagnosis 0f P-AF just to demonstrate that I was indeed getting episodes of irregular beats but they weren't interested.
....Rachel just to add the British hypertension Society have a list of monitors validated by them....
bhsoc.org/bp-monitors/bp-mo...
click on each one and it will tell you if it registers an irregular heartbeat or in some instances possible AF
Hi Doodle, thank you for this, we are trying to gather a list of people who use them, and we may be in touch. Would you mind either sending this by email, or sending me a private message with your name, email address, contact number and location. Thank you, Rachel
I have a monitor close to my bed and sends the info to my heart Dr. I don't see the info. Then I go to the clinic and the tech. There checks my pacemaker twice a year. I say get a pacemaker!!!!! I love my, no problems with it., Had it for 4 yes. Now!!!
The Kardia will give you a one lead EKG. Depending on what body parts you touch it with will change the lead.
So even if Kardia can not exactly tell you what the reading is you still have a true one lead ekg to look at and intrepret or have someone like your doctor interpret.
A simple blood pressure monitor that just blinks when something is odd is not good enough to me once diagnosed with an arythmia.
Thank you for this, we are trying to gather a list of people who use them, and we may be in touch. Would you mind either sending this by email, or sending me a private message with your name, email address, contact number and location. Thank you, Rachel
Yes, I have a Kardia on my mobile phone and find it invaluable for reassurance and info re what my AF is doing. Also my cardiologist accepts the readings as evidence.
Hi Rachel, I have an AliveCorp Kardia attached to my iPhone. I found it a great help when I had attacks as I could record them and send them straight to my cardiologist.
Hi Rachael. During my first AF attack in May I tried using my home BP monitor made by Sanitas. This proved useless as it could not get a reading at all, and I suspect simply that the very high pulse rate was out of range.
After a couple of days I talked myself into buying the Kardia, direct from their web page. I know it can be had a little cheaper elsewhere, but I didn't want to risk getting old stock, an earlier model or something. I immediately started using it several times a day to reassure myself that I was still in normal sinus rhythm, but this enthusiasm petered out after the first week, and then it just got left on the back of the phone unused.
My phone failed one day, the day before a trip away to see family, so I had to replace it urgently and ended up with a different model which needed a different case. All the time before the case got sorted I was carrying the Kardia loose and separately, and found that I became quite anxious because it _wasn't_ immediately available and could be lost. On return I mounted the Kadia slide on the new phone case with sticky foam strip and then had peace of mind.
On my next trip away with my touring caravan in a remote farmer's field, I had my second AF attack. Knowing what was happening from my reading on this forum, and not wanting to start a hare running in a strange A&E with a whole new set of medical notes etc., I chose to just save a set of Kardia recordings and wait to see if it reverted naturally, which it did. I have since seen my GP and shown him those recordings and now have a referral to a good cardiology department. You could take the view that my possession of the Kardia unit has saved the NHS some money already.
I have a Heal Force Prince 180D. I bought it after the first attack of AF.
I use it. 1. for an accurate pulse count.
2. For an ECG i can print out and show to medics.
3. for me to hear accurately what is happening: the hearing is the clearest way I can decide what type of arrhythmia I have. I am surprised that hearing is not available any other way, and I could not find on the web, examples of each type of arrhythmia by sound. If you could find a link to a good site, that would be helpful. Stethoscopes are cheap, and we patients could get to know the sounds of the different arrhythmias. It is far easier than learning to read an ECG.
4. I can distinguish between AF and tachycardia accurately, just by hearing, and then I have the traces to prove it! I can in one AF incident document AF becoming Tachycardia then AF. Fascinating.
You see, I believe in the patient learning about their own condition, and learning to interpret simple data. I often find that useful health information is hard to find.
I similarly have a Heal Force Prince 180-D, which I bought after googling a comprehensive document comparing various models (“Comparison of handheld, 1-lead/channel ECG / EKG recorders” by James W. Grier). I find it synchronises with the heart rate that I feel with a pulse check, so personally, I think it is pretty good. It produces tracings almost as good as hospital ones, though of course when you print them out, you print them on normal A4 paper, not the graph paper of a typical ECG. Even so, you can measure eg R to R, identify P waves (if they are there) etc etc. You can use the machine by itself or (quite complicated to begin with: use the 4 supplied leads which you place in positions (shown in the booklet). It helps that you can get a trace running overnight & longer, it's just a question of staying relatively still, or, if I move, eg turn over, I turn on the light, make a note of the time & can identify the movement on the trace in the morning (movements - as opposed to changes in heart rate - are pretty obvious on the trace anyway). I could go on about this piece of equipment but James Grier's review is very clear reading. I will only add that you can expand the recording, so that you can look at segments as small as 15 minutes long on your computer & print them out. Generally, I printout an overnight trace, or a partial trace, then identify the parts that interest me (eg runs of tachycardia/bradycardia) or sections that look unusual, & print those out or save them on my computer.
I use the preventicus heartbeats app. It is pretty impressive. Accurately detects when I am in AF.
I do have an AliveCor Kardia and I use it about once or twice a week depending on how I feel. I let my husband use it to. I have a CRT-D implant so I'm not too sure how reliable the EKG is but the heartrate is pretty accurate and if I have afib, then so be it, or sinus tachycardia ( if the HR is over 100) i most likely can tell that as well. If I do spring for the analysis, it's usually spot on. I have yet to show my doctor, when I told my EP I had one, he laughed out loud (LOL)!!!
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