Qardio Core

Excellent opportunity to pick up irregular heart beat – This is easy to strap on and wear. App is easy to use. The quality of readout is excellent . Great if trying to detect irregularities. In the App you can scroll backward after pausing the live ECG to have a look at where you felt irregular beats . Once you see it, you can screenshot it and save it, to show your doctor, or email it. You can do email 30 second snapshot. My cardiologist (Australia) is right up with QardioCore . Any way to help identify bothersome problems that don't show up consistently (using 25 hr or 7 day holters) is a great idea he says. Possibly a life saver too! It doesn't read well if doing exercise but it is a quality readout and medical grade readout if sitting ( like if working at a desk). Expensive but very good so worth it in my opinion. Finding arrhythmia can be extremely difficult without this. I already owned a different brand, Kardia, a bery good small 30 second monitor ( place fingers on flat surface electrodes) but this is far superior as it has continuous recording. Much better for me anyway.

Great new tech, but with some issues – The Qardio Core is a wearable device which attaches below the sternum and records health data. As well as breathing rate, heart rate variability and heart rate, the device records a continuous ECG, all of which is displayed on your smartphone. The last feature attracted me to the unit as I’ve experienced an undiagnosed arrhythmia. The unit is reasonably straightforward to set up, and the medical feedback I’ve had is the quality of the trace is excellent. So far I have recorded the arrhythmia on multiple occasions which has provided doctors with invaluable data.

That’s the good stuff, now the not - so good stuff. This is still new technology and a key issue is the integrity of the connection. It is not uncommon to check the app to find it has randomly disconnected. Sometimes a fix involves powering off all devices, changing blue tooth settings, and going through a new start up sequence. This takes several minutes and isn’t feasible if you’re going about your day and just want the unit to record in the background. If you’re not tech savvy, this device may be too problematic.

My other gripe is with Qardio. While their support is excellent, is was very difficult to purchase the product. They were out of stock locally and any contact (assuming it was answered) was met with: “it’ll be available in two weeks”. After six months, it was clear that this product wasn’t going to be available and I ordered from overseas.