Mario Aguilar covers technology in health care, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wearable devices, telehealth, and digital therapeutics. His stories explore how tech is changing the practice of health care and the business and policy challenges to realizing tech’s promise. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

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Seven years after Apple released a smartwatch feature that can detect possible atrial fibrillation in users, similar technology has become commonplace on a range of wearables. A new meta-analysis of 26 studies of devices that detect the arrhythmia concludes that the watches “possess excellent diagnostic accuracy.”

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Indeed, in the figure above you can see that most of the devices included in the review correctly identify people who do and don’t have A-fib a high percentage of the time. An ongoing concern about detection algorithms built into widely used consumer devices is the false positive rate — or people incorrectly told they may have a condition. Even a low rate magnified over millions of devices could mean headaches for your local cardiologist.

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