We’ve heard many stories about the Apple Watch alerting people to life-threatening health conditions. A new story out of New Zealand, however, truly shows the breadth of what the Apple Watch’s preventive health monitoring can do for users.
Amanda Faulkner, a consultant psychiatrist based in Napier, New Zealand, upgraded to the Apple Watch Series 10 last year. After using her husband’s old Apple Watch for years, one of the new features offered by the Apple Watch Series 10 is the Vitals app. The Vitals app tracks your overnight metrics, including heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep. It then delivers a report every morning, alerting you if any of your metrics were abnormal that night.
In an interview with The New Zealand Herald, Faulkner said her Apple Watch sent her multiple alerts that her resting heart rate was elevated from historically being around 55 beats per minute to being in the 90s. Initially, she thought her Apple Watch “must be faulty.” As the alerts kept coming, however, she decided to pay a visit to the doctor and share data directly from her Apple Watch.
Faulkner’s general practitioner referred her to the emergency department, where she underwent testing and was diagnosed with a rare type of blood cancer called Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. Doctors told her that if she had come in just a few days later, “she could have died from her untreated cancer and its complications.”
The following day (January 9), she was transferred to Palmerston North Hospital.
Faulkner is not out of the woods yet. She has been in Palmerston North Hospital ever since, receiving chemotherapy.
In July she’s booked for a stem cell transplant in Wellington, which will replace her bone marrow with that of a donor’s from Europe – essentially giving her new bone marrow and a new immune system (July is the earliest staffing and available bed space allows).
The stem cell procedure has a 20% chance of mortality, she says.
“Hand on heart, if it wasn’t for my smartwatch constantly nagging me, I wouldn’t have even noticed something was wrong,” Faulkner said. Mike Faulkner, Amanda’s husband, also said the Apple Watch “made a life-changing difference” and increased his wife’s chances of beating cancer.
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