Dennis Anselmo with the Apple Watch that saved his life Dennis Anselmo
Posted on 03/15/2016 7:46:55 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Gadget owner called 999 after watch told him his heart rate was dangerously high
A BUILDER who was suffering a heart attack had his life saved by his Apple Watch.
When Dennis Anselmo started to "feel terrible" he thought it was because he was coming down with a fever.
But when the 62-year-old glanced down at his Apple gadget he saw that his heart rate was more than 210 beats a minute.
Doctors who later cleared the blockage in his arteries told him if he had gone home and slept he would have likely had a second, fatal attack, in the middle of the night.
Dennis told The Sun: “I was building a fence placing posts in the ground. We finished lunch at 1.15 and was back to work.
“I felt terrible - like I had a really bad flu. I worked for maybe ten minutes but said to my helper I need to sit down.
“So I sat on trailer for a couple of minutes and was planning to go home - I felt all over the place.
“As I sat there I started to fiddle with my Apple Watch.
"I had only had it two weeks and had become obsessed with checking my pulse on it.
"I have a very low pulse normally - about 50.
“Most people are 55 to 75. I brought it up and - and it was 210 bbm.
"I turned to my helper and said: We need an ambulance.
“They came out, figured out I was having a heart attack and I was off to hospital. They cleared the blockages so I didn’t have another attack.
“They told me that if I had gone home and gone to bed - as many people do - I would likely have had another, more serious bout in the middle of the night. Those second attacks are the ones that kill. That is a common problem.”
Dennis is a watch fanatic and owns 35 of them, so when he wanted to buy another his wife Mary, 59, told him not to.
He said: “She complained but after the heart attack she said 'that watch has paid for itself'.
“Since the incident the other 35 are locked up and don’t see daylight.”
Dennis, from Morinville in Alberta, Canada, was working in nearby Edmonton when he had the heart attack on August 18 last year.
He was taken to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton.
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had a hypertensive crisis once from drug interaction, maxed out at about 260 beats a minute.
didn’t walk away totally unscathed but walked away alive :)
it’s surreal. Caused a thalamic stroke. sensory symptoms still exist, but nothing I can’t live with :)
what I think happens is that the blood is pumping too fast for the organs to grab with it needs from the blood.
Apple has a pretty good marketing department. (I am skeptical of everything these days.)
I was making a similar motion trying to aerate my lawn when I had my first heart attack.
Maybe not. I have a defibrillator which monitors my heartbeats and has triggered 3 times. Just before it triggered I just got tunnel vision and started to black out, then BAM!!! But the pain from the shock is unbelievable.
An Apple a day...
Thanks for this heads up, SM. When I upgraded the mini-ipad and iPhone4s to 9, they had added health watch app automatically. I turned it off thinking these devices are getting to know too much about us. I would like to feel my personal life has some areas of privacy. Is it true that Apple products can’t be hacked by the gov.? Even if true, when data streams thru isps, can’t it be captured or is it still encrypted? I doubt it’s unreadable.
Yes, Apple's newest iPhones and iPads are pretty much impregnable to being broken into, even by the government and even Apple cannot get into them if you forget your passcode. However your iPad Mini and your iPhone 4s are not.
For your Apple devices to be invulnerable to such government hacking, they need to be running iOS 8.2 or above, and have an A7 or higher processor with a Secure Enclave chip on the System On A Chip along with it. The A6, similar to the iPhone 5C, the one in the FBI/Apple fight, is close in that it has an Encryption Engine buried inside the A6 processor and is almost as secure, but there are means in which it can be compromised. The iPhone 5S has the A7/Secure Enclave combination, along with the TouchID fingerprint sensor. The TouchID has been improved for the iPhone 6 and even more for the 6S, to improve the invulnerability of the devices.
The data that goes through the carriers, the ISPs, is not under Apple's control. The Meta Data such as phone numbers of who you call and who calls you and the duration and time is logged, and the NSA is probably listening in, as are the data, time, and content, regular messages and voice mails. Emails, ditto.
But iMessages and FaceTime, Apple's own messaging and Video Phone system, are encrypted when sent to any other Apple device and are unreadable except at either end device. . . and FaceTime cannot be intercepted (tapped intelligibly) by any pen register system. Anything that goes from any Apple device to any other Apple device is encrypted to a 256 bit AES standard. Apple has upgraded anything going to iCloud from later devices than the iPhone 5 to encrypt the data stored there before it leaves the iOS device. It is unreadable by Apple or anyone they are required to hand it over to, including the government. Anything sent to the iCloud from your iPhone 4S was not encrypted until you upgraded to iOS 8, but it is now. However, the iPhone 4s itself is still very vulnerable. You need to upgrade it.
The Apple Watch is a motivator to get you moving and exercising. . . as well as monitoring your health. It will not rat you out to someone else unless you set it to send health info to your doctor. Signals sent via bluetooth from the Applw Watch to the iPhone are encrypted.
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