Smartwatch AFib alert sends dad to ER before heart surgery

When Joseph Holycross came home from work feeling off, he had plenty of reasons to brush it aside. He was a busy father of four, worked long hours and had grown accustomed to blaming a racing heart on caffeine and exhaustion. His wife, Jamie, saw something that worried her. She urged Joseph to use the ECG feature on his Samsung Galaxy Watch4 Classic. Seconds later, the result gave him a reason to stop making excuses and head to the emergency room. What doctors discovered would lead to a week in the hospital, open-heart surgery and new health concerns for Joseph's family. It also completely changed the way he looks at the smartwatch on his wrist.

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Joseph says the elevated heart rate had been happening on and off for roughly a year and a half to two years. At the time, just weeks before his 40th birthday, he did not see it as a warning sign. "I tend to fuel with caffeine. I'm a father of four, so, you know, we tend to drink coffee and things like that when we're tired to kind of push through the day," Joseph told CyberGuy.

That made the symptoms easier to explain away. If his heart was racing, Joseph could point to coffee, exercise or a long day and keep going. Then Jamie noticed something different. "She had made the comment that I looked like I was short of breath, like I was breathing strangely," Joseph recalled. Jamie works as a respiratory therapist, so her concern carried weight. This time, Joseph agreed to check his heart with the ECG feature on his Samsung Galaxy Watch4 Classic.

Joseph had owned his Galaxy Watch4 Classic for about three years. Before this happened, health monitoring was hardly the reason he wore it. He mainly liked being able to receive messages or answer calls while he worked without carrying his phone around the shop. He had tried the ECG feature perhaps once about a year earlier, mostly to see what the watch could do. This time was different.

Joseph scrolled to the ECG feature, tapped the option to record and followed the directions on the screen. He says the watch instructed him to remain still and keep his finger on the sensor while it recorded for about 30 seconds. "It came up and told me immediately at the top in bold letters, atrial fibrillation," Joseph said. His reaction was immediate too, but it was not fear.

"Denial," Joseph said. "I just thought it had to be a malfunction. I wasn't even 40 yet." He wondered whether the watch could be wrong, especially because it was an older model. So he ran the ECG again and then repeated it several more times. Jamie was not interested in continuing to test it at home. Joseph recalls her telling him, "We need to go to the ER and have an actual EKG done just to make sure."

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