{"id":440927,"date":"2025-12-11T21:10:25","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T21:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/440927\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T21:10:25","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T21:10:25","slug":"the-space-force-issued-him-a-smartwatch-it-saved-his-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/440927\/","title":{"rendered":"The Space Force issued him a smartwatch. It saved his life."},"content":{"rendered":"

Space Force Tech Sgt. Garry Springle said he would not be alive were it not for a smartwatch that the service issued him for an ongoing fitness study it\u2019s conducting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not long after starting the study, Springle noticed the smartwatch consistently told him he was falling short of the Space Force\u2019s fitness standards. Specifically, the watch was saying he was not meeting his required intensity minutes \u2014 a measure of heartbeats during exercise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In order to meet the intensity requirement, Springle needed to get his heart rate up to 70% of the maximum rate for his age. But no matter how hard he exercised, he couldn\u2019t get his heart rate high enough. Other than that, he was not experiencing any physical symptoms that indicated what might be wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always thought maybe something was wrong with the watch, but I kept at it, and I didn\u2019t give up,\u201d Springle said. \u201cAnd come to find out, I had a heart problem, and it could have easily \u2014 very easily \u2014 taken me out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

After Springle was advised to seek medical help, he learned he had an undiagnosed heart condition that would have killed him if it had not been detected.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe cardiologist and the electrophysiologist that I was being seen by and treated by, they both explained to me that if left untreated, my heart would have failed unexpectedly,\u201d Springle told Task & Purpose. \u201cI was not having any symptoms, so it was what I am calling a \u2018silent killer.\u2019 I didn\u2019t know it was happening, but they explained to me that I\u2019m very lucky that it was caught.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guardians like Springle were issued wearable devices as part of the Continuous Fitness Assessment, a voluntary study in which specific fitness benchmarks were constantly monitored.\u00a0 Initially, those guardians did not have to take fitness tests, but in October, the Space Force introduced a new PT test<\/a> that everyone in that service is required to take.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As part of the study, guardians are required to exercise a certain amount each month, said Christine Heit, lead for the Space Force\u2019s Holistic Health Approach, which includes the study.<\/p>\n

Initially, the Space Force took some ribbing on social media<\/a> for issuing expensive smart devices to its members and then promptly telling them they didn\u2019t have to take a PT test. However, one of the study\u2019s goals was to have guardians exercise routinely instead of waiting until shortly before a fitness test to start working out, Heit told Task & Purpose.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some people who understand the benefit of working out regularly and do so because they find intrinsic value in it,\u201d Heit said. \u201cThere are some who don\u2019t. There are some who, a couple of weeks before their scheduled fitness test, they get off the couch, they start running, they choke out a physical fitness assessment, and then they\u2019re sore for three weeks afterwards. We wanted to do away with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Springle, who had spent more than seven years in the Army prior to joining the Space Force, said he found the notion of meeting the required fitness goals intriguing. But within weeks, it was clear\u00a0he was facing a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI just felt like something was wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cHaving to meet the intensity minute requirement each week, I was finding myself struggling with that, and I didn\u2019t want to get prematurely kicked out of the program. So that\u2019s when I started reaching out to as many people as I could, just to figure out what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, Springer brought his concerns to a Space Force physical fitness expert, who \u201cnoticed that my heart rate wasn\u2019t increasing the way it should be\u201d during a certain test and\u00a0suggested that Springer see a doctor.\u00a0 He then went to his primary care manager and had an electrocardiogram test that records electrical signals in the heart, \u201cand that\u2019s when everything took off from there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The formal name for the issue Springle was facing is premature ventricular contractions. In layman\u2019s terms, his heart was literally skipping a beat.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, every other heartbeat that I was having was essentially a fake one, and my heart wasn\u2019t actually beating,\u201d Springle said. \u201cSo, my heart was only working about 50% of a normal person.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a shocking revelation for Springle. At the time, he was working out five days a week and then hiking with his family on weekends. And yet, he had learned that he could have suffered heart failure at any moment because of his condition.<\/p>\n

As for Springle, he said the whole ordeal \u2014 and the unexpected close call \u2014 taught him a valuable lesson: You have to be your own biggest advocate, and if you \u201cnotice something wrong,\u201d he said, \u201cdon\u2019t just brush it off.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause you never know how something little can turn into something so big.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Jeff Schogol is the senior Pentagon reporter for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for nearly 20 years. Email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com or direct message @JSchogol73030 on Twitter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Space Force Tech Sgt. Garry Springle said he would not be alive were it not for a smartwatch…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":440928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[705,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-440927","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-gadgets","8":"tag-gadgets","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115702990987621394","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}