Veterinarians use electrocardiogram recordings (ECGs) to diagnose arrythmias, or irregular heart rhythms, in horses. Because ECG equipment isn’t always available (or requires a laptop and Wi-Fi connection) when practitioners are examining horses on the farm, manufacturers have begun developing portable ECG devices vets can use and interpret simply using a smartphone app.
“If these devices could deliver good-quality ECGs, or at least sufficient-quality ECGs, they might aid the practitioner in the field to record ECGs and better diagnose arrythmias,” said Lisse Vera, DVM, during the 2019 British Equine Veterinary Association Congress, held Sept. 11-14, in Birmingham, U.K.
Vera, a PhD candidate and predoctoral fellow with the Equine Cardioteam in Ghent University’s Department of Large Animal Internal Medicine, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, in Merelbeke, Belgium, and her colleagues recently performed a study evaluating the quality and ease of use of different ECG device and app combinations. Their goal was to determine which pairing produced the best recordings.
The study included 24 healthy horses with normal heart rhythms. Vera’s team recorded each horse’s resting ECG using a traditional ECG device simultaneously with a smartphone-based device. They repeated this with three different smartphone-based devices:
AC-002 designed for veterinary use.
AC-009 designed for human use.
An adapted AC-009 that had been modified by Vera’s team.
They tested each device in combination with two apps:
The AliveCor app designed for veterinary use.
The Kardia app designed for human use.
Smartphone-based ECG devices are essentially phone cases with electrodes that veterinarians can place against the horse’s skin at the left atrium (behind the elbow at the girth). They work by emitting ultrasound waves that the smartphone’s microphone picks up and uses to produce an ECG recording. Vera designed the adapted AC-009 device in an attempt to improve its quality and ease of use. She attached wires to the device’s electrodes and connected them to self-adhesive electrodes placed on the horse’s left wither and left apex beat area for wider spacing of the electrodes and better contact.
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