Over the past century, clinical trials and large-scale heart studies have led to vast insight on general heart health and conditions like atrial fibrillation. Yet we still don’t entirely understand why heart health can suddenly decline, nor why seemingly healthy individuals can suffer a dangerous cardiac episode.
These gaps in knowledge led UCSF cardiologists Jeffrey Olgin, MD, and Gregory Marcus, MD, and epidemiologist Mark Pletcher, MD, MPH, to create the Health eHeart Study, an ambitious online cardiovascular study that aims to recruit 1 million global participants and monitor their heart health online through smartphones and wearables like the Apple Watch, integrating health care into our everyday lives.
All this data may eventually help doctors predict the development and reoccurrence of heart disease – and it also may pave the way for how clinical studies use technology to collect information about other health conditions in the real world.