A 76-year-old man in China has become the latest beneficiary of the Apple Watch’s life-saving heart rate monitor. The smartwatch is at the center of numerous stories where someone was alerted to an irregular heart rate and then discovered a serious medical condition which threatened their life.
The latest one involves a man named Gaston D’Aquino. He was at a church in Hong Kong when he got a notification from his Apple Watch informing him that he had an elevated heart rate. He told the South China Morning Post that he had read about such cases before and knew it was something serious.
Keeping this in mind, he decided to head straight to a hospital. He confessed to the doctor there that he was feeling fine and didn’t think there was anything wrong. However, the electrocardiograph machine revealed that there was indeed something wrong with him and he immediately got referred to cardiologists.
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They in turn conducted a series of tests over the next 3 days. Turns out, out of the 3 main coronary arteries, 2 were completely blocked and 1 was 90% blocked. This is a very grave position to be in, and D’Aquino says he had no clue his heart was a ticking time bomb.
D’Aquino later had an angioplasty done to open up his clogged arteries. The self-confessed Apple fan decided to write to Tim Cook to thank him and the CEO replied in kind. Interestingly enough, he didn’t even buy the wearable as a health monitoring tool, but to get call alerts.