Heart health- good excuse to buy Garmin Epix?

Apart from heart rate does anyone use a Garmin watch to keep an eye on heart health- does it do anything useful?
My Dad has always had high blood pressure, had open heart surgery and just had a massive stroke.
Current Garmin is pretty old and the HRM on it is a bit shit.

The only thing it will give you other than heartrate is HRV the Ecg functions are disabled in the UK , my doc says a BP monitor was a better buy  ,take a reading everyday and average out  , kind of indicated everything else is a bit of a gimmick in terms of medical equipment being certified whereas watches are an indicator of some metric

I am not a doctor.

The more advanced ECG functionality isn’t available on Garmins in the UK.

https://support.garmin.com/en-GB/?faq=QssFZHtIOfAYNSSmzXNwY9

Apple Watches will do ECG. In general though, what are you looking to determine about heart health with the device? Certainly gathering loads of data about his heart with a Garmin and Apple Health didn’t stop my Dad having a heart attack, and every medical professional he’s dealt with has been completely dismissive of the data.

This was recommended on here by tomb

https://giftshop.bhf.org.uk/alivecor-kardiamobile-ecg-monitor

Was on this thread https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/going-private-for-tests/  might be a better option than a full on watch that might not do it properly

I have a Garmin Epix

Maping and tracking great

Sleep tracking, actually quite like this, i was a skeptic

Pretty display, yes

Resting pulse and pulse when warm, great

Pulse when cold total rubbish

HRV possibly vodoo

Heart Health i see no evidence. Maybe i turned it off

If you want a nice watch then buy it. But it’s a toy

Yes I pretty much agree with the above. So the new gubbins isn’t really a game changer.

One of the lads at work just bought one, even with the discount he’d got, all of the cycling/sports nerds thought it was a bit pricey for something that hangs off your wrist while running about.

But then he’s got no kids/missus/mortgage to consider, and is apparently training for an Ironman. He did say he’s tracking sleep, rest and recovery with it as well as training, so maybe is making use of it as a more all-round training tool.

It’s a bit of a monster too size wise, definitely going to take more knocks so the sapphire is kinda required.

I asked him why the FENIX didn’t appeal, he just said the price difference wasn’t that great once he’d looked at the 7 pro and he might as well trade up one as he saw it, Which TBH I get.

naturally enough the rest of us all started justifying our cheaper Forerunners, instincts and FENIX choices. But it’s a bit silly, buy the sports watch that suits your activities, lifestyle and budget. There’s a Garmin for pretty much everyone these days.

Note: A watch will just record data, what you do with that OP is more important.

TBH the epix 2 only appeals at the half price H Samual deal. I like the sound of the screen I’ve always found the normal ones really dark.
I don’t think I’ll bother I’m pretty tight and I only use a tiny fraction of the stuff on the Garmin I’ve had. I find the wrist HRM on my current one rubbish.

I am a cardiologist*. By all means use your heart as an excuse to buy a man toy, just don’t expect it to provide any meaningful information. As above, a BP machine is far more likely to generate clinically useful data.

Caveat: an ECG recording watch can be invaluable in the diagnosis of some types of palpitations in people who have symptoms. But as ‘screening’ tool for healthy people without symptoms there’s very limited justification at present. That may change over the next few years as we learn whether asymptomatic AF detection is a clinically useful metric and how to use that information.

Wearables and personal health is an exciting field, for sure. But it’s not a mature enough industry yet.

*Not your cardiologist. Not medical advice.

Is the idea that you check your own ECG and look for weirdness? Or that if you feel poorly you can show the doc a load of ECG recordings you made over the previous period?  If the former, then as far as I can tell the wiggles indicating problems are very subtle and not really interpretable by the layman. But I’m not a cardiologist, or a medical doc of any sort, so may be talking sh….

The Apple Watch does AF detection. I don’t know what the algorithm is, but I’d wager it starts by looking primarily at the beat-to beat variation in heart rate. They probably finesse it with machine learning algorithms to avoid false positives. But it’s reasonably accurate – there’s a large 100,000 person study they published a couple of years back. The question is what should you do with that knowledge. That is less clear cut.

The other side of it is when people come to see me who’ve been experiencing palpitations. It’s very useful if they say “look here doc, my heart rate jumps from 60 to 170 for 20 minutes – here’s the HR graph and here’s the ECG.” That can save weeks / hundreds of pounds in expensive hospital investigations.

Thanks Superficial, I’ll have a look at it.

Samsung user here

Not sure if it continually monitors for AF (I’ll try and find out)

It does have an ECG function though

This is what you get when you use it – not much use to anyone.

But you can download an excel/CSV that looks like this. Means nothing to me, but has 15,000 lines of data

Oh crikey

What I really want is a watch that says ‘yes you can eat another biscuit’.

What I really want is a watch that says ‘yes you can eat another biscuit’.

I’ve had one of those for years. At least that’s what I assume it means when it says “tick, tock”.

The nerd in me is quite impressed that Samsung give you the raw data. In the past I’d have been MATLABing the hell out of that.

I wonder if Apple creates a metric for user death (based on a sudden halt of all activity across various platforms) and whether they cross reference that against all the trillions of datapoints of HR data. It’s fascinating.

you can spoof garmin into installing the ECG app

you can spoof garmin into installing the ECG app

Can you do that without popping over to the US?

The nerd in me is quite impressed that Samsung give you the raw data. In the past I’d have been MATLABing the hell out of that.

I would imagine it’s fairly easy to plot a graph that presumably would look very similar/identical to the ECG line that we are familiar with?

15,000 data points @500Hz, so 30 seconds along the x axis. The data figures seem to go between around +1.5 to -1.5 on the y axis

OP you are talking about heart health and mention your family history. You may have already done this but at the very least you should be optimising your lifestyle/checking your BP and cholesterol levels.

What the Garmin does/does not do in terms of ECG monitoring isn’t really relevant to your family history as presented. ECG measures electrical activity. Heart attacks/BP worries by and large refer to vascular/plumbing problems (technically atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease or ASCVD) – not electrical (though there can be overlap of course). ECG monitoring on a Garmin (even if accurate) won’t really predict anything as regards preventing ASCVD progression. Lifestyle/BP/cholesterol will to some extent and are our best tools.

By and large we are all going to get atherosclerosis if we live long enough so the measures above are to slow down its progression and also to stop unstable plaque from developing/breaking off (causing heart attacks and some strokes).

COI: GP

Ionenic, never had cholesterol checked and I was monitoring blood pressure but got bored although it is high. Comes down massively after a long ride of course. Thanks, I need to sort this all out properly. I’m 52 so ‘in the zone’ for this stuff.
I also need to sort a will.

Ah i initially read this about by a watch for your Dad !

Listen to the expert above and save yourself a few pennies, or if you want a gadget, buy a gadget.

Of course you could go privately for proper heart tests, but you would want/need clinical reason for this

My cousin has an Apple watch, he has diagnosed af . My Dad has an Apple Watch and he has had irregular heart issues.  I don’t think either have had a medical intervention based on the data from their watches , but if it gives them a sense of security whilst doing things, fair enough!

IoneonicFull Member
OP you are talking about heart health and mention your family history. You may have already done this but at the very least you should be optimising your lifestyle/checking your BP and cholesterol levels.

MrsJ has a family history of high cholesterol despite exemplary diet, and has just started to get high levels in her blood tests. She is unable to book an appointment to speak to GP about it. So she may as well just get a watch. It does as much (or little) as the health service, and provides more entertainment.

They are in stock in Witney H Samuel, and I happen to be opposite taking my Mum for an eye test. Might just pop in and look at it in the flesh. At the moment I don’t think I’ll buy. If I want better HR accuracy on a ride I’ll wear the chest strap.

I’m currently having heart stuff investigated, but it was my symptoms rather than the watch that made me see the GP. However, he was keen to take the ECG data from it as my Samsung had background IHRN and the alert had gone off a few times and prompted me to take an ECG. So in my experience, not a medical device (although it is FDA-approved I think), but the data might help.

Popped in to Witney to have a look at one in the flesh. It’s a beast and certainly didn’t give me the urge to buy it.

@jamze

The Samsung ecg is registered as a medical device in some countries.

That’s why garmin ecg isn’t available here.  They have to actually be validated to demonstrate they work. That being said I would use it as an indicator rather than a diagnosis tool.

Ta. Yes, I don’t rely on it for diagnosis. I’ve actually got rid of the Samsung, now back with Garmin and thanks to the comment from @poah above, tried spoofing my GPS location on my phone and the ECG feature popped up on my Venu. So thanks for the tip, all now working.

It’s a bit of a monster too size wise

The EPIX comes in 3 different cases sizes, same as Fenix.  The 51 was indeed huge but I wear the 47 daily and it doesn’t feel massive to me, or maybe I’m used to it.

I opted for the Gen 2 Ti/Sapphire, non Pro, due to big discounts pre Xmas.  Very happy with it and it’s essentially only missing ECG and the torch from the Pro.

you can spoof garmin into installing the ECG app
Can you do that without popping over to the US?

Yes, I believe so. Something about VPNs and spoofing the GPS location;

I enabled Garmin ECG app here in the UK on Venu 3!
byu/litetaker inGarmin

What I did was

change my account location to USA on garmin.com

spoof my GPS location to somewhere in the USA using an Android GPS spoof app

connect my VPN to the US

then when you open the settings for your watch in the Garmin app, finish setup is there with the ECG option. Once installed you can set everything back to UK.

Nice, thanks guys…

One other thing it made me do was enable two-factor on my Garmin account. Maybe that’s a medical data security thing?

I got a new fenix 7 pro yesterday. I did what Jamze said and it worked first time. The android app I used was the aptly named “Fake GPS”.