What should you do if your wearable device tells you something’s amiss health-wise, but you feel fine? With this engineer’s experience as a guide, believe the tech and get yourself checked.

Mid-November was…umm…interesting. After nearly two days with an elevated heart rate, which I later realized was “enhanced” by cardiac arrhythmia, I ended up overnighting at a local hospital for testing, medication, procedures, and observation. But if not for my wearable devices, I never would have known I was having problems, to my potentially severe detriment.

I felt fine the entire time; the repeated alerts coming from my smart watch and smart ring were my sole indication to seek medical attention. I’ve conceptually discussed the topic of wearables for health monitoring plenty of times in the past. Now, however, it’s become deeply personal.

Late-night, all-night alerts

Sunday evening, November 16, 2025, my Pixel Watch smartwatch began periodically alerting me to an abnormally high heart rate. As you can see from the archived reports from Fitbit (the few-hour data gaps each day reflect when the Pixel Watch is on the charger instead of my wrist):

and my Oura Ring 4:

for the prior two days, my normal sleeping heart rate is in the low-to-mid 40s bpm (beats per minute) range. However, during the November 16-to-17 overnight cycle, both wearable devices reported that I was spiking the mid-140s, along with a more general bpm elevation-vs-norm:

ECG-expanding condition understanding

By Monday evening, I was sufficiently concerned that I shared with my wife what was going on. She recommended that in addition to continued monitoring of my pulse rate and trend, I should also use the ECG (i.e., EKG, for electrocardiogram) app that was built into her Apple Watch Ultra. I first checked to see whether there was a similar app on my Pixel Watch. And indeed, there was: Fitbit ECG. A good overview video is embedded within some additional product documentation:

Here’s an example displayed results screenshot directly from my watch, post-hospital visit, when my heart was once again thankfully beating normally:

I didn’t think to capture screenshots that Monday night—my thoughts were admittedly on other, more serious matters—but here’s a link to the Fitbit-generated November 17 evening report as a PDF, and here’s the captured graphic:

The average bpm was 110. And the report summary? “Atrial Fibrillation: Your heart rhythm shows signs of atrial fibrillation (AFib), an irregular heart rhythm.”

The next morning (PDF, again), when I re-did the test:

my average bpm was now 140. And the conclusion? “Inconclusive high heart rate: If your heart rate is over 120 beats per minute, the ECG app can’t assess your heart rhythm.”

The data was even more disconcerting this time, and the overall trend was in a discouraging direction. I promptly made an emergency appointment for that same afternoon with my doctor. She ran an ECG on the office equipment, whose results closely (and impressively so) mirrored those from my Pixel Watch. Then she told me to head directly to the closest hospital; had my wife not been there to drive me, I probably would have been transported in an ambulance.

Thankfully, as you may have already noticed from the above graphs, after bouts of both atrial flutter and fibrillation, my heart rate began to return to its natural rhythm by late that same evening. Although the Pixel Watch battery had died by ~6 am on Wednesday morning, my recovery was already well away:

and the Oura Ring kept chugging along to document the normal heartbeat restoration process:

Too high…too low….just right

I was discharged on Wednesday afternoon with medication in-hand, along with instructions to make a follow-up appointment with the cardiologist I’d first met at the hospital emergency room. But the “excitement” wasn’t yet complete. The next morning, my Pixel Watch started yelling at me again, this time because my heart rate was too low:

My normal resting heart rate when awake is in the low-to-mid 50s. But now it was ~10 points below that. I had an inkling that the root cause might be a too-high medication dose, and a quick call to the doctor confirmed my suspicion. Splitting each tablet in two got things back to normal:

As I write this, I’m nearing the end of a 30-day period wearing a cardiac monitor; a quite cool device, the details of which I’ll devote to an upcoming blog post. My next (and ideally last) cardiologist appointment is a month away; I’m hopeful that this arrhythmia event was a one-time fluke.

Regardless, my unplanned hospital visit, specifically the circumstances that prompted it, was more than a bit of a wakeup call for this former ultramarathoner and broader fitness activity aficionado (admittedly a few years and a few pounds ago). And that said, I’m now a lifelong devotee and advocate of smart watches, smart rings and other health monitoring wearables as effective adjuncts to traditional symptoms that, as my case study exemplifies, might not even be manifesting in response to an emerging condition…assuming you’re paying sufficient ongoing attention to your body to be able to notice them if they were present.

Thoughts on what I’ve shared today? As always, please post ‘em in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the Principal at Sierra Media and a former technical editor at EDN Magazine, where he still regularly contributes as a freelancer.

Related Content

• Wearable trends: a personal perspective
• The Pixel Watch: An Apple alternative with Google’s (and Fitbit’s) personal touch
• The Smart Ring: Passing fad, or the next big health-monitoring thing?
• The Oura Ring 4: Does “one more” deliver much (if any) more?

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