Retired nurse practitioner says her Apple Watch helped save her life

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Apple Watch Heart Beat
Apple Watch Heart Beat (Image credit: Rene Ritchie/iMore)

What you need to know

  • A retired nurse practitioner says her Apple Watch helped save her life.
  • The watch alerted her to two instances of her heart rate falling abnormally low.
  • Doctors diagnosed an issue thanks to the Apple Watch and a pacemaker was fitted.

A retired nurse practitioner says her Apple Watch helped to save her life after it twice alerted her to an abnormally low heart rate. Doctors later diagnosed an issue and she now has a pacemaker fitted.

According to local reports, the normally active Patti Sohn was sitting watching TV when her Apple Watch warned that her heart rate was around 40 beats per minute. After having things checked at the hospital, her heart rate returned to normal and she went home.

Then it happened again.

Sohn rushed to the hospital. After a number of tests, her heartrate returned to a normal range. She went home with a monitoring device, but four days later the watch beeped again because of a low heartrate. Sohn then had to have a pacemaker put in.

Apple Watches have helped out in similar situations before and Apple continues to invest in trying to make its wearable as capable as a health device as possible.

The current Apple Watch Series 7 is the best Apple Watch ever made, but it still can't replace a hospital filled with doctors — be sure to speak to a medical professional if you're unwell.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.