Smart watch saves man’s life

Plenty of people would argue they can’t live without their smart watch, but for Adam Love it actually saved his life.

By Sophie Walsh, 9NEWS.com.au Jul 31, 2018

The 24-year-old told 9NEWS he knew something was up when he started getting notifications from the health app on his Apple Watch which monitors your heart rate.

“My sleeping heart rate was averaging about 130-140 beats per minute. So that was while I was resting about six hours at night,” Mr Love said.

A healthy resting heart rate is around 60 beats per minute, and a trip to the doctors confirmed Mr Love had a dangerous abnormality- a hole in his heart that he’d had since birth.

His upper lung was also pumping into the wrong atrium of his heart – the right side instead of the left.

“So the blood needlessly circulates around the lung and doesn’t get out into the rest of his body,” his cardiothoracic surgeon Professor Michael Wilson explained.

Standard procedure would have been open heart surgery, but in an Australian-first his surgeon Prof Wilson at the Mater Hospital went off-script.

Rather than cutting Mr Love open through his breast bone, his surgeon made a small key hole incision on his right side. He then used a daVinci 3D robot to patch up the hole, cutting the recovery time from 12 weeks to just three.

“You’re spending a shorter time in intensive care, a shorter time on a ventilator, fewer blood transfusions and up and about in the ward, and you’re usually home within four or five days,” Prof Wilson said.

Just four days after his surgery, Mr Love is planning to go home tomorrow, admitting, “It turned out pretty good.”

Funnily enough Mr Love is studying robotics at university, and is now an Apple fan for life.

I don’t think I’d live without one now. I love it for the convenience but also the fact it just picked up something medically that I had no idea about and it potentially saved my life.”

Source 9NEWS.com.au

Also see
How my Apple Watch’s heart rate monitoring saved my life in Macworld