Palpi
He almost didn’t press record.
A patient in his 40s came in for a third opinion. He’d been feeling his heart race for years. He’d worn a few cardiac monitors already, and none of them had caught anything. His episodes had gotten worse, so he came in for another opinion.
He was wearing an Apple Watch. I asked if he’d ever captured an EKG when his heart started racing. He hadn’t. He wasn’t sure it would be reliable enough to matter.
I’ve diagnosed real abnormal rhythms off Apple Watch recordings before, so I told him to try it and come back with whatever he got. We were still waiting on his insurance to approve a Holter monitor when he came back a week later. He’d kept a detailed log of every episode, each one with a matching EKG from his Watch.
Apple Watch is only FDA-cleared to flag atrial fibrillation and report a fast or slow heart rate. It’s not built to diagnose much beyond that. But one of his recordings had captured a clean, detailed trace of AVNRT, a specific and treatable heart rhythm problem. He got an ablation. It’s fixed for good.
Diagnosing a rhythm problem takes a timely recording, plus knowing what brought the episode on and what it felt like. I kept watching patients struggle to bring me all of that together, even with Apple Health and a few other logging apps open on their phones. Most of those apps try to do too much. I built Palpi to do the one thing that actually matters for a visit like this: capture what happened, when it happened, and the EKG that goes with it.