The Pediatric Apple Watch Study is a study driven by a mobile application aimed to assess the utility of the Apple Watch for detecting children’s heart problems.

Background

Smartwatches can help physicians detect and diagnose irregular heart rhythms in children, according to a new study from the Stanford School of Medicine. The finding comes from a survey of electronic medical records for pediatric cardiology patients receiving care at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. The study was published online Dec. 13 in Communications Medicine.

Over a four-year period, patients’ medical records mentioned “Apple Watch” 145 times. Among patients whose medical records mentioned the smartwatch, 41 had abnormal heart rhythms confirmed by traditional diagnostic methods; of these, 29 children had their arrhythmias diagnosed for the first time.

As a result, the Stanford Medicine research team plans to conduct a study to further assess the utility of the Apple Watch for detecting children’s heart problems. The study will measure whether, in kids, heart rate and heart rhythm measurements from the watches match measurements from standard diagnostic devices. The study is open only to children who are already cardiology patients at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.

Important Skills

The Pediatric Application Watch Study is a multi-person project and will be developed by a team of students and members of the Stanford Mussallem Center for Biodesign digital health group. We are looking for talented and motivated contributors who would like to assist us in the development of the open-source ecosystem.

1. Spezi is currently written in Swift and SwiftUI. A prerequisite to work on the mobile application parts of the project will be sufficient Swift knowledge to start contributing to a moderate to large open-source project. You should be familiar with the existing Stanford Spezi ecosystem of modules and functionalities.
2. The active study monitoring and data analysis is conducted using Python-based notebooks collecting data from a Google Cloud Firebase-based project. The notebooks are based on the ‣. You should be familiar with Python-based development and Google Cloud Firebase to contribute to these parts of the project.

First Steps

<aside> 📧 Our Choose Your Research Project page provides a great overview of how to engage with your supervisors. The following first steps will help you to get familiar with the project and demonstrate your existing skills.

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• Check out the respective repository for project at https://github.com/StanfordBDHG/PediatricAppleWatchStudy. Check out the repo as well as the ‣ about a list of current open issues and current elements all contributors are working on.
• We encourage you to merge 2-3 smaller pull requests to get familiar with the project and demonstrate your ability to work with Spezi modules. The Spezi Project board provides an excellent overview of open issues and ways to start with good first issues.

After completing these initial steps, please reach out to Aydin Zahedivash ([email protected]) and Paul Schmiedmayer ([email protected]) to discuss how you can become more actively involved in the project and contribute to the research.