Millions of Canadians suffer from heart disease. Every 7 minutes a person dies from heart disease or stroke and 9 in 10 Canadians have at least 1 risk factor for heart disease or stroke.   Early detection of heart disease could save thousand of lives every year and save our health system billions of dollars.  

Many Canadians have inadequate health care and do not have access to regular testing or monitoring of their health meaning that heart disease and risk of stroke is undetected for many.  Because of this people are becoming their own health advocates by educating themselves and monitoring their symptoms and progress from home.  

All too often irregular heart beats such as AFib and PVCs are missed when wearing a heart monitor or during testing in a lab environment or a person may not even realize that they have a heart issue.  Imagine the time, money and lives that could be saved if detection could be done from home.

Apple Watch has an free app that does just that!  It has three heart monitoring features: low heart rate, heart rhythm irregularities such as AFib and a recordable ECG feature.  Apple and Standford University have just complete a study on the ECG feature with 420,000 participants and the results are very encouraging!   The ECG feature was released in the US in December 2018 and in 19 European countries in March 2019.  Already the ECG feature has detected heart issues in various Apple Watch wearers in those countries which in turn has saved their lives.  Unfortunately the ECG feature of the app is not available in Canada and it seems that Apple has not yet applied for use within Canada.  It’s time that this ECG feature becomes available for Canadians!

Please sign and share this petition to encourage Apple and Health Canada to work together to make this free ECG app available to Canadians as soon as possible.