Alivecor afib detector and hearing aids

I’m familiar with the KardiaMobile. I work in this space of vital signs detection and my brother-in-law is a cardiologist that uses them.

The KardiaMobile uses simple dry pads to try to measure the ECG signal arm-to-arm. Electrically, the interface is very noisy. Their caution against wearing hearing aids seems to be as a source of electrical interference. From my knowledge about electronics, I think it’s an alarmist, CYA, extreme thing to ask people to turn off their HAs.

HA’s use very simple, low-energy, baseband audio signals that won’t affect ECG readings at all. If you’re using wireless HAs, electrical interference such as BLE bursts from your HAs (or full Bluetooth if you’re streaming from your phone) may put noise on their signals. My guess is that it won’t be enough to affect their readings, especially if what you’re looking for is AFib which is detected purely by its pattern in the rhythm, not a subtle wave shape issue like inverted T-waves or S-T interval pathology.

The worst that will happen is that you would receive cardiologist reports from AliveCor that would say there’s interference in the signal, and then going forward you can turn off the HAs. I would give it a try without turning off HAs and see what happens. My gut says it’ll be fine.

Just the same, I would hang up the phone and stop stream music while you’re recording (if you even have BT connected HAs).