Get an OMRON HCG-801 Portable ECG. It will give a message "irregular heart rhythm" Look at the ECG strip on the monitor. No P Wave. Squiggles instead. Irregular spacing of Ventricular beats. Simple.

petey

Before my ablation, my Oximeter would bounce around like a ping pong ball when I was in AFIB anywhere from 40-140 BPM. Look at the graph bar, it will be chaotic. Oximeters are cheap, less than $50.00. Now, after ablation, the beat is nice and steady. That's how I know my PAC's aren't AFIB.

Hi Trent,
The easiest and fastest way, Ive found is to feel your jugular vein in your neck.

A nice tic, toc, tic, toc, tic, toc and youre in sinus rhythm.

A pac (premature atrial contraction) or pvc (premature ventricle contraction) is a beat or set of beats that interrupts the underlying rhythm.
A pac or pvc might feel like: tic-toc, ---, tic, toc, tic, toc. The underlying rhythm is tic, toc, tic, toc, tic, toc.

The difference between a pac and pvc is the origin of the extra beat (atria or ventricle) and can only be seen on an ekg.

Heres a good website that visualizes the concept of the human heart's premature ectopic complexes using waterfowl:
http://www.mauvila.com/ECG/ecg_premature.htm

Atrial fibrillation is different from pacs and pvcs in that there is NO underlying rhythm! Youve got long pauses followed by a number of very fast beats and then some slow beats in a completely irregular fashion. I like to compare it to the Pink Panther Theme. ( Although the Pink Panther Theme is a lot more organized than my atrial fibrillation! )

I bought a MD100E, Med Choice hand held ECG monitor in February. Because my holter ecgs had only caught two very short a-fib events I wanted to be sure that I was really having these 4 12 hour a-fib episodes. I wanted hard evidence that this was really happening (because when I wasnt in a-fib I felt fine and the time in a-fib just felt like a bad dream). I can print out the results or after I transfer them to my computer I can send them per e-mail. Once I caught an hour full of pacs which felt sort of like a-fib but not quite. I felt the long pauses but none of the faster beats. When I looked at the ecg readings it was clear: pacs.

I dont have a newer cell phone (I cant even take pictures with mine although I can use it as a telephone!!) so I cant personally comment on the AliveCor. I have read that it is easy to use, makes good ecgs and you can send them to your doctor easily, too.

Hope this helps!
Take care,
atp

Thanks for everyone's ideas. Petey I like the omron HCG 801 just don't know if we could swing the 300 bucks right now. I will look into them today.

Trent

I agree with ATP, the carotid artery is my choice.

I also use my bp monitor. It beeps with each heart beat. Easy to tell right away by 'hearing' the erratic beats, they are consistently erratic. Skipped beats, of which I often have, are not erraticly all over the place, they have more of a pattern.

Oh My.......I guess I have a different situation, when I go into a fib all I have to do is look at my chest and see my heart flopping around like a fish , its that marked and out of sync, same with my radial pulse I can see it there and its all over the place , I know the exact second it starts and the exact second it goes back to sinus.....my own internal monitor :) Having said that, when I am in a fib my BP monitor doesnt work at all, my heart guy said its almost impossible to get a BP reading in the middle of one of my episodes , and I do realize Im not really helping you one bit with this answer but this is how it goes for me , best of luck Trent !!!!
jan

Hi Trent,

When I was initially diagnosed with afib I was asymptomatic and I did not want to exercise when in afib as that would make it a lot worse so I purchased an Omron HCG-801.

I really liked it especially the message it would give you at the end of the reading to tell you if your rhythm is irregular or regular. If you have PVC's during your reading the Omron algorithms may interpret this as an irregular rhythm (at least it does for me) so this feature may be less useful for you because you will not know if it is due to afib or pvc's without reading the ECG strip as Petey noted.

When I purchased my Omron I would have preferred buying the Alivecor because of its integration with the smartphone, ability to send ecg's to your doc, smaller footprint, and cheaper cost. However, the Alivecor was not available to the public at that time.

Interestingly when I showed my cardiologist the Omron he said he was going to get one for his office; when I visited him recently he had decided to get the Alivecor. If he Alivecor detects something unusual he will then do a 12 lead ECG. His office used the Alivecor on me shortly after my ablation and they could not clearly discern P waves so he did a 12 lead ecg; with my Omron I could clearly see the P waves. In reading reviews of the Alivecor it gets high marks for ecg traces so go figure.

I found the attached site on 1 lead ecg's useful so you may want to check it out

http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~grier/Comparison-handheld-ECG-EKG.html

The one thing I don't like about the Omron is the cumbersome process required to send ecg readings to your doc. You need to remove the SD card, insert it into your pc, start the ECG viewer software (not available on MAC), copy the ecg's from the sd card to your hard drive (assuming you want a history of these), print it out to lets say a pdf and send it as an attachment. If you want to send multiple ecg's as a single attachment you will need to get software that combines pdf's or print out ecg's and scan them into a single document.

Now you might ask how often you have to do it. Well recently I had to because the readings from my heart card monitor that I am using post ablation during the blanking period could not be read by my doc; fortunately I was taking ecg readings as backup in the event of problems so I could send those.

opsyn

I guess I depends on what you are using the portable ECG for. I don't need to send my ECG trace to my EP and if I did, she would probably change her email address. :) For me, having a separate device from my phone makes more sense. Of course, I'm not an Iphone App person. And I don't want to miss any phone calls while I'm playing with my ECG. The OMRON gives great tracings and it is easy to take the SD card out and put in the laptop... but I never do. I have no need to.

So I guess you have to decide WHAT you want to do with your readings.

petey