Apple Watch, WHOOP Failed To Alert Man Of Near-Fatal Heart Attack, Wife Says In LinkedIn Post
Both Apple and WHOOP watches failed to detect the oncoming heart attack.
A man suffered a near fatal heart attack while having two smartwatches strapped to his wrists that did not catch anything amiss, according to a LinkedIn post from his spouse on Monday.
"The initial symptoms were totally text book, what we read and hear of often-severe sweating, pain in the arms, breathing unease," his wife Minal Srivastava said in her post.
Srivastava's husband was wearing an Apple watch and a WHOOP smartwatch that were calibrated to monitor the wearer's health. But both watches failed to detect the oncoming cardiac arrest.
On noticing the symptoms and raising it with a flight attendant, the pilot offered to deboard him and offer emergency medical support including ambulance services. Srivastava's husband decided to accept the help, despite his smartwatches indicating that everything was okay.
"He asked for five minutes to decide. In those five minutes he tried walking a bit, shaking off the unease, making himself puke, looked at the two watches strapped to his wrists - an Apple and a WHOOP which did not show anything abnormal and then thought of his 13-year old son and made his choice, 'I want to go home!' (sic)," Srivastava wrote.
"Those five words and that choice was made basis the false assurance of two devices on his wrist- an Apple Watch and a WHOOP," she added.
Her husband went under surgery, with a five hour delay. A situation that is often referred to as a "Widow's Call", according to Srivastava, due to the the fact that the surgeon needs to make a call to the patient's family with the possibility of having to tell them that they were unable to save the patient.
"That choice was a literal death sentence," she wrote.
She credited her husband's survival to good luck and "athletic will power."
"By absolute sheer stroke of luck, finding the right people, the right resources at the right point in time and obviously having an athletic will power developed over years of persistently playing some form of sports, he survived," Srivastava said in her post.
Srivastava, who is also the vice president of Reliance's Fashion and Lifestyle section, said that they were lulled into a false sense of security as her husband would often joke that the smartwatch would warn him that he was having a heart attack when he was playing a sports match.
