'If it wasn’t for my smartwatch constantly nagging me, I wouldn’t have even noticed something was wrong,' - Amanda Faulkner. Photo / Mike Faulkner
'If it wasn’t for my smartwatch constantly nagging me, I wouldn’t have even noticed something was wrong,' - Amanda Faulkner. Photo / Mike Faulkner
Amanda Faulkner came within 48 hours of death in January. Alerts from her smartwatch saved her life.
The consultant psychiatrist, based near Napier, had been feeling hot and fatigued and had suffered a heavy period but, being busy with more than 60 patients, had initially brushed it off. She put her condition down to the December heat - running into the 30s in the Hawke’s Bay - or possible perimenopause.
“I thought I was probably just a bit anaemic,” she told the Herald.
But the Vitals app on her Apple Watch Series 10 - a treat to herself after wearing her husband Mike’s old Watch for years - told her otherwise. It was delivering notifications that her resting heart rate - usually around 55 beats per minute - had increased into the 90s.
Being fit and healthy - she and her husband had recently been hiking in Australia - Faulkner admits she initially thought her Watch must be faulty.
But the alerts kept coming, with Vitals reporting outliers every morning, prompting her to visit her GP. She was able to share graphs with her Apple Watch, which displayed a clear trend.
“Hand on heart, if it wasn’t for my smartwatch constantly nagging me, I wouldn’t have even noticed something was wrong,” she said.
Unfortunately, something was very wrong. Her GP sent her immediately to the ED in Hastings for tests. Within four hours, she had been diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia, a rare type of blood cancer.
She was advised that if she had delayed medical attention, she could have died from her untreated cancer and its complications in a matter of days.
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.
The Apple Watch Vitals app tracks overnight health metrics, including heart rate, respiratory rate and temperature.
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).
As a trained medical doctor - she worked for eight years in hospitals in the UK as a psychiatrist and for three years in hospitals in NZ before moving to private practice where she specialises in trauma clients such as sexual abuse survivors - Faulkner is under no illusions about the seriousness of her situation.
The stem cell procedure has a 20% chance of mortality, she says.
“It’s pretty confronting.”
Yet she and her husband were in upbeat spirits when they talked to the Herald.
Mike and Amanda Faulkner.
Mike hopes she will achieve remission from her cancer if the stem cell transplant is successful.
He praises Apple Watch for saving his wife’s life, acknowledging that the data made a “life-changing difference” and gave them a head start, increasing his wife’s odds of beating cancer.
Faulkner, who has previously featured in these pages for everything from her soprano talents to her involvement in the fight for justice for Lake Alice survivors, has a full personal and professional life to get back to. She says a key concern is to get back to the 64 patients who were on her waiting list at the time she was diagnosed.
Early-warning role
Apple stresses that its heart features - first-approved by the FDA in 2018 - are not diagnostic, or for monitoring. It frames them as screening tools that can help alert people to a range of possible conditions and provide them with more information to share with their GP or specialist.
Earlier, Dr Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice-president of health, told the Herald that, while the Watch should not be considered a diagnostic tool, feedback from the medical community and users indicated an elevated heart rate “can be a good indicator of a number of conditions” including an impending fever or allergic reaction.
After a study 2023 study on how smartwatch data could be integrated into clinical practice, involving eight healthcare providers, University of Auckland health informatics researcher Dr Ruhi Bajaj said “with the enhancements in machine learning algorithms and likely new healthcare roles, wearables have the potential to transform our healthcare models from reactive to proactive and prescriptive”.
One of Bajaj’s UoA colleagues, Dr Amy Chan at the university’s School of Pharmacy, is currently conducting research that aims to develop a prediction model for asthma attacks by capturing changes in the body that may happen before an attack occurs, using the Apple Watch and other wearables.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
