my new toy…

I’m a self proclaimed nerd. If you’ve been reading this blog long enough this may not come as a surprise, although I may have fooled you into thinking I’m some super cool party girl, what with all the……napping, and……you know, napping. Perhaps you have mistaken my obsession with superheroes and technology for the new uber hipster nerd,but I assure you, I am entirely too much of a nerd to ever use the word “uber” or “hipster” successfully.

As a nerd, I get pretty excited about the newest gadgets and gizmos, even though it’s years before I can afford them, and at that point they’re outdated. I try to pass them off as “vintage”, but I don’t think anyone’s buying it. I have a particular interest in medical/health gadgets and gizmos, for obvious reasons. So, it probably comes as no surprise that I love playing with my newest gadget:

This is the AliveCor.  It records electrocardiograms (ECG/EKG) through a cell phone.  I received my AliveCor for free as part of their testing phase.  You can check out their website here.  It attaches to the back of  a cell phone by sticky pads like this:

To use the AliveCor, you active the free app on your phone which connects to the sensors.  Then, you hold the phone with the screen facing you and grip the silver sensors with the fingertips of each hand. You can watch the ECG across your screen as it is happening. Once the AliveCor has generated the ECG, you can print out a pdf of the ECG online through your account.  The AliveCor also has a feature that lets you email an ECG to your doctor (or anyone else), or for a few dollars you can send it to a medical professional for review.

With all of my doctor and ER visits, I’ve had quite a few ECGs over the years. Other than showing tachycardia, PACs and PVCs, my ECGs usually come back normal. Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anything structurally wrong with my heart, it just doesn’t function as it should.

So, now that I can access it instantly, I like to take an ECG for fun to see how my heart responds to different things.

Here’s what my heart does while I’m working at my desk:

The added the red circle just to show you what happens if the sensors are not gripped correctly. This often happens for the first second of the ECG while the app talks to the sensors.

Here I am watching the news:

Playing a game of Candy Crush:

Eating ice cream:

Just kidding. The last one is an ECG during tachycardia, which happens a lot these days as I get off the beta blocker.

Certainly helps explain all the napping!

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Smell ya later.
– Linds