Karelia Pro costs $100 to buy but you must sign up for the $15/month plan to have a cardiologist review the readings. The author of this article, Dr. Pearson, says the instrument is good for monitoring Afib and assessing palpitations, premature ventricular contractions, tachycardia, and other problems.
Skeptical Cardiologist: Do Mobile Heart-Monitoring Devices Work?
OMRON makes excellent blood pressure monitors. Last year they introduced a combination BP monitor + EKG, the first to measure for both high blood pressure and atrial fibrillation, two different risk factors for stroke.
Here’s a review of portable ECG instruments from 2018 (already getting out of date) that has good information. The author points out “ Many handheld ECG devices give only limited information as compared to conventional 12‐lead ECGs. Hence, concerns about their accuracy and reliability need to be examined. As information obtained by ECG invariably needs to be interpreted along with clinical inputs, it is debated if out‐of‐hospital use will really be beneficial.”
Portable out‐of‐hospital electrocardiography: A review of current technologies, by Agam Bansal, MBBS and Rajnish Joshi, MD, MPH, PhD, April 2018, Journal of Arrythmia, Japanese Heart Rythm Society.
Here’s another on-going review and comparison of mobile, handheld ECG instruments.
Comparison and review of portable, handheld, 1-lead/channel ECG / EKG recorders by James W Grier, Department of Biological Sciences, North Dakota State University. He started his review in 2006 and most recently updated it March 2019. Dr. Grier provides excellent advice to the layperson using one of these monitors:
For the vast majority of layperson users of handheld ECG devices, in my experience with many friends, contacts, and colleagues, you will want/need the device for a given problem such as afib, be using it while under physician/cardiologist care, and only use/need it for a relatively short period of time (generally less than a year and often even less than a month) ... until the problem has been better identified and, hopefully, solved by an operation and/or medications. Your role as a patient doing home monitoring is to to simply obtain the recordings and pass them on to your physician, not to read and understand the results, but be able to properly record and either store or immediately send them to your physician
But when you “die”, what is needed is a portable defibrillator. Sometimes a sharp hit on the chest will restart the heart if no defibrillator is present.
Here in the Philippines, sudden cardiac death in young men, usually when they sleep but not always, is alas common. The problem is Ventricular fibrillation. Two of my husband's relatives and the cook's son all died this way suddenly.
taking beta blockers sometimes help, depending on the etiology, and I suspect that if you survive, an implantable defibrillator might be life saving.
some cases are heart attacks from clogged arteries (or spasm especially in those taking cocaine, meth, cigarettes, or viagra). Other cases are congenital problems with the conduction system, i.e. the wiring of the heart (sometimes this is why young athletes drop dead). Still others are from various forms of cardiomyopathy (I believe Breitbart had a form of this, complicated from high blood pressure).
One of my patients, post cardiac surgery, was prone to V Fib and had one implanted. I once asked him if it worked, and he said yes: He had been cutting wood a few days before and it went off and he almost cut his foot off.
(no, he wasn't supposed to be doing heavy work, but hey, he was a farmer and you can't slow them down).