Home Screening for Detecting Subclinical Atrial Fibrillation.

The advent of cardiac implanted electronic devices with accurate atrial arrhythmia diagnostic capabilities has revealed a large burden of "silent " atrial fibrillation that is present in the cardiac population. Many studies have been completed, and many more are ongoing, to determine the correct treatment course when these atrial arrhythmias are detected. Alongside the development of accurate atrial diagnostics within the devices, has been the growth an entire network of wireless home monitoring capability. It is now possible to see, over the internet, individual patients' atrial arrhythmia burden on every day. This capability has tremendous promise for patient care, with the possibility of reducing strokes, decreasing heart failure, preventing cardiomyopathies, and likely substantially reducing health care costs. As this innovative diagnostic capability is generating large amounts of data, protocols for what should be done with the plethora of new information are being developed. In the pages that follow, we will present what is known about home monitoring for silent atrial fibrillation, and present the results of recent studies published in this arena.