“With all the TV maker partnerships Apple announced at CES, plus its earlier content deals, it’s clear that video service is Apple’s next big thing,” Ina Fried writes for Axios. “But as Apple CEO Tim Cook made clear in a CNBC interview Tuesday, transforming consumer health is Apple’s next really big thing.”
If you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, ‘What was Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind?’ It will be about health. … We are democratizing it. We are taking what has been with the institutions and empowering the individual to manage their health. — Tim Cook to CNBC’s Jim Cramer
“Apple has already invested years to understand tech and build relationships with hospitals, doctors and regulators,” Fried writes. “Those are things, unlike a new app or phone feature, that are hard for rivals to quickly duplicate.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There is so much that is left to do in the health arena, from having universal, secure medical records that every one of a patient’s doctors can access to research that can yield amazing breakthroughs that Apple is uniquely positioned to deliver!
Apple has tested with the Macs how to extend the life of an update beyond what anybody can expect. Now they can begin testing the formula with humans.
It would be great if the Apple Watch can read your blood pressure and blood sugar in diabetics, that is a game changer!.
Then AAPL will shoot to the MOON.
A third party has developed a blood pressure cuff that integrates with the iPad. Maybe an Watch band can do the same thing as a cuff. As long as the FDA approves that band then I’ll buy that watch band.
More focused is the continuous blood sugar readings built into the watch. There is currently continuous blood monitoring devices that works with the iPhone and Watch. Apple wants, IMO, to deliver a bloodless monitor inside the watch – no pricing fingers. That has huge potential, especially because monitoring blood sugars with strips and finger pricks can get very expensive for many.
The interesting aspect is how much can Apple gather under their umbrella, becoming a wide ranging tool for the patients, the doctors and hospitals/clinics. Just start thinking about possible uses when the appropriate monitors are build into the watch itself. I like the idea of pregnant women having a collection of data related to pregnancy, How about identifying data that represents labor contractions, not just a month or so before the Due Date, but several months before then to identify problems that need to be addressed to save the baby’s life.
Inpatients wearing an Watch when not in their bed can notify CICU if the heart kicks up while the patient is waiting for X-Ray to run their CT-Scan or MRI. Or if the patient is walking and their heart rate shoots up.
Those examples relate to Apple gathering data & information under the Umbrella. That is where Apple needs to go,
Health is the tip of the iceberg for tech companies (specifically Apple) for bringing it to the masses and out of the doctors offices. With this and Apple’s head start, Wall Street and naysayer stockholders don’t know what they have.
Apple’s Techno-Health R&D and investment and resulting outcome shows that its EARLY health problem detection has the potential to yield more financial gain in the next 10 years than the iPhone has in the last 10 years.
The Apple Watch Series 4 is much more capable medically than currently configured. I am a physician and can tell you that we are not the least bit worried about exposing more hypochondria, the watch actually helps separate who is having physical versus mental problems with their heart. Additionally, the EKG is actually quite a bit more important and capable than just telling if AFib is present. It just requires the completion of a few of the large data informatics studies current being done, with numbers that are utterly startling in the sample size. The future is already here and will unfold by the work that is already done and continues to be done in data collection for these huge cardiac studies. As a medical device, nothing this powerful has ever, literally, been in (on) the hands of users.