It's not a very good device and moreover, you have to have the patient come to the hospital to get a formal hook-up procedure and disconnect and there's a fee for that. You can't take a shower, you can't exercise. You really can't have normal function for that period of time. 'The Holter monitor is very obtrusive for patients. 'I'm thinking the Holter monitor has had a long course, since 1949, and it might be on the way out,' said Topol. A survey of participants, meanwhile, found that 81 percent of them preferred wearing the patch over the Holter monitor, with 76 percent saying the Holter monitor affected their daily living activities. The study data suggests that the arrhythmia events missed by the patch were mostly due to algorithm errors which could be corrected in future versions of the patch.īoth doctors and patients preferred the Zio patch. Doctors who looked at data from both devices said they reached a definitive diagnosis 90 percent of the time when using the patch results and 64 percent of the time when using Holter monitor data. For the initial 24 hours when both monitors were worn, the Holter monitor detected 11 arrhythmias missed by the Zio patch, but the Zio patch picked them up over the remaining time. The Zio patches detected 96 arrhythmia events over two weeks of monitoring, whereas the Holter monitors detected 61. 'And you actually want to encourage patients to exercise with the band-aid on them. 'What I like about is you're getting the person more in the wild, more in their natural state,' lead author Dr. The Zio patch does not have any sort of connectivity - the readings are simply stored in the water-resistant device, which the patient mails to iRhythm at the end of the monitoring period. The study of 146 patients with mild atrial fibrillation compared the two devices over the length of time they were designed to be worn - 24 hours for the Holter monitor, a mobile phone-sized device worn at the waist and connected to the patient via multiple lead wires and two weeks for the Zio patch, a smaller adhesive device worn on the patient's chest. A new study from the Scripps Translational Science Institute, published in the American Journal of Medicine, shows that iRhythm's Zio patch, a wireless adhesive heart monitor patch, detects more arrhythmia events than a traditional Holter monitor and provides a better experience for patients.

Zio patch results