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Apple's Next Frontier Is Your Body
Lashdots writes: Amid the unveiling of the Apple Watch, Tim Cook's wrist distracted from another new product last month: ResearchKit, an open source iOS platform designed to help researchers design apps for medical studies—and reach millions of potential research subjects through their iPhones. Alongside the company's new frontiers, like the car and the home, Cook told Jim Cramer last month that health "may be the biggest one of all." As Fast Company reports, Cook says Apple's devices could could help pinpoint diseases within decades—and position the company at the center of a "significantly underestimated" mobile-health industry.
"It's the biggest one", cook said when Lamont asked to borrow $100. "I'm coming Louise".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Not sure I want Tim knowing about my body.
Mr. Cook associated himself with the underbelly of Wall Street in order to hype the Apple Watch? Shame...
What do they call these nervous nellies who constantly monitor their pulse and blood pressure, hyperventilate with the least bit of excitement? It's kinda like 'helicopter' parents, but they 'hover' over themselves. *I've fallen! And I can't get up!*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Just as the Internet has enabled people to "self-diagnose" all sorts of illnesses they don't have cyberchondria, so will this enable people to take it to the next stage, by "self-diagnosing" symptoms they weren't aware they had.
I for one do not welcome our Apple alien probes.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Sounds kinky.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
will be health issues and obsession with health. There's a lot of money in it, and the U.S economy is gearing up to capitalize on it on a whole new level.
my frontier, not Apple's.
And it is soooo easy!!
So, what part of my body is Mr Cook interested in?
Sounds like positioning for another round of ridiculous patents, only with the word "mobile" used to modify old ideas. This would be the new hot modifier after "electronic", "computer", "internet", "cyber", etc. have been used to claim ownership of old ideas with slight modifications.
This will lead to the next big disease - malusdomesticaphobia - the fear of apples (yes, it's a real term).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
With Apple's recent departure from the release of quality products backed by thousands of man-hours of QA, I would be concerned about having them involved with anything to do with health.
i wonder how many device generations it will take before the apple watch just charges off of your body's ambient energy field.
Cook says Apple's devices could could help pinpoint diseases within decades
Usually if I have a disease I'm thinking I wanted it pinpointed within days or weeks!
We already had a South Park episode about this.
- Gronk!
I'll be buggered if I let apple stick anything up my backside
Ain't nobody going to install pentabular screws in my body.
Android Apps don't need any permission from the user to access the accelerometer, which is the main sensor in "fitness trackers" as well. Your flashlight app may be counting your steps.
Apple's iProbe (EZ-insertion technology patent pending) and monitor kit will sold separately for the low price of $139.95. Look for a public announcement soon!
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Apple's Next Frontier Is Your Body
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
When it was launched I found it more interesting than the watch which was presented at the same event. I also think that this initiative would not hace come from Jobs. And even habitually Apple bashing slashdotters must grudgingly respect that it is open source.
One of the research areas was particularly interesting: it was if I remember well a study about asthma symptoms, and the participants phone location was used together with a grid of a few 1000 air polluants sensors in New york city, to better find correlation.
With future generations of the Apple watch likely gaining in sensors (I read that they hired a guy who made a phd out of creating a non-invasive blood glucose sensor, for example), I can indeed imagine that more and more diverse research with 1000s of participants can become much more easy to realise.
Yes, cynical slashdotterd will perpetually try to focus on negative sides of anything Apple does, yet this is in my opinion a worthy service, one that we should rather be thinking about how to create valuable research with.
Apple is simply big datafying the backbone of clinical research: the subject survey. You want to cure disease? Support your local PhD. Medical doctors are just glorified technicians.
The correct answer to the question of what the next frontier is, "Sorry, you'll have to wait [period of time] for our [X] event ..." Pretty standard, but it works.
A fairly wrong answer is, "We're making an [X] that will beat/improve/revolutionize [Y]." Yeah, that's just no way to seduce customers.
And an OMG wrong answer is, "The thing we've just released will be much more important in 10 years." WTF?
I'm amazed that Tim Cook, of all people, is pushing speculation about the future importance of Apple. If he actually said this, then either he just pulled a colossal brain fart, or this does not bode well at all.
only over my dead... and that's already assigned to students teaching/research. Sorry Apple hype.
HealthKit is for those people measuring metrics around heart rate and so on (which it seems to me lots of people do simply to improve how they work out rather than because they think there is anything wrong).
ResearchKit is about measuring what ACTUALLY happens to you over the course of a day or week, rather than what you imagine (or pretend) is happening.
It's also about vastly expanding the data points researchers have into how disease or lifestyle affects people.
And the whole thing is open source so there can be ResearchKit clients for Android too...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For several months I've been pondering the Apple Watch, mostly from a useless and WTF points of view. So I was gravely disappointed that Apple would waste so much of their resources and cash on such a thing.
News items over the weekend have quickly changed my opinion. No, I will not be buying one or investing in Apple Inc. yet.
Let's say, I figured out THE use, i.e. purpose, of the Apple Watch.
It is based on that "Taptic" i.e. touch plus haptic in the Apple Taptic Engine inside the Apple Watch.
The Taptic Engine turns electricity plus commands or notices into vibrations. And people can communicate by vibrations.
This turns the Apple Watch into, potentially, the greatest Sex Vibrator for both Male and Female ever made! Which by way, the Porn Industry will quickly jump on and exploit in numerous ways.
Yes indeed. Your "love one" though far away can communicate to you with the Apple Watch attached to your "Johnson" and or "Batgirl Cave", i.e. penis or vagina or even your "Back Door" if you are into the Gay Way using the Taptic Engine.
The only question now is Battery Life needed to the Climax, i.e. orgasm.
Apple Inc. just became the Porn Industries best friend.
Ha ha
>"[watch/body]Alongside the company's new frontiers, like the car and the home,"
Oh yes, Apple, save us. Because somehow Apple is or will be first and/or most innovative in those spaces just like the concept of the smartwatch they just invented, or the larger phone screen, or pull-down notifications, or touch screens, or auto-updating apps, or handwriting recognition, or all-in-one computers, or windowing! Or whatever the media wants to currently declare Apple created.
I love how when it involves Apple, somehow history is always re-written. And yes, I will scream the next time someone asks me, again, if my 8-month-old Moto 360 I wear every day is "the new Apple watch!!!!!" Funny how almost nobody noticed it until recently.
so will this enable people to take it to the next stage, by "self-diagnosing" symptoms
ResearchKit is about using sensors and apps to send data about what you do to researchers. It's not about diagnosis at all, simply data collection... there is no "diagnosis", other than what a doctor might tell you from the gathered data.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple anal probe.
ResearchKit is basically just a data-funnel, yes - but even that is useful to have as a basis for collecting health data, because it can pull anything from HealthKit you give it permission to.
Healthkit in turn, is where any number of devices and specialized monitors (like glucose measurement) can feed data into.
The Watch may not track glucose levels, but since HealthKit can track that data, as long as you have a sensor it can still be fed back to researchers, or into something like a glucose-monitoring Apple Watch App.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hell, I won't even use digital thermometers out of concern that they'll upload my body temperature to the internet. I'm not going to be uploading my vitals to some app developer in Mencino.
Honestly, I think we're seeing late-stage Apple at this point. Each new product announcement makes a smaller and smaller blip on the radar, and Apple is entirely a company whose fortunes are tied to the faddish vitality of a brand name. Every year Apple does less and less to differentiate itself, and their older products are starting to whither a bit. The people who were excited about OSX 16 years ago have less and less to be excited about with each passing year and those aren't the same people who are going to get excited over a watch or something that will tell them they need to exercise more.
I'm not saying Apple is going to crash and burn or disappear, but when a company's capitalization is their biggest news don't make the mistake of thinking the future is a foregone conclusion. (see: IBM).
You are welcome on my lawn.
...someone else's body. Or maybe nobody's.
Anyway, it's definitely not my body.
Yo dawg, would you like a douche in yo douche?
I can see the health insurance company execs already salivating over this one.
"Sorry Mr Banks, we are denying you coverage for your due to alarming data from your iMonitor®.
That could monitor all kinds of body vitals, with the added bonus that nobody would ever want to steal the thing. They could call it the "aPhone".
I'll open with a (perhaps the only) positive - Good on Apple for releasing the ResearchKit as open source. That said, there are still a LOT of barriers here.
First of all, while ResearchKit is open source, it is still predicated on iPhone sensors and the like, so in this way it is proprietary. Now, perhaps with time and effort it can be expanded to allow the same sort of thing to be done on Android devices, but as of right now it is effectively proprietary. However, this leads into a bigger issue: Standardization AND privacy for health data and metrics.
Right now we have a horrible platform when it comes to medical data and privacy. Despite HIPAA and the mandate to move to electronic medical records, these were horrible half measures that in many ways did more harm than good by not being specific enough. For instance, the idea between EMRs was that any doctor, hospital, pharmacy etc.. should be able to transfer and use data from any other. HA! Fat chance. Why? Because of our old friend that has fouled up accessible quality medical care for years - the unregulated profit motive, and its friend: proprietary lockdown!
EMR systems, even for a small office based practice, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're talking millions for hospitals or other larger centers or networks. And yet, they're all horribly modular and insular. Each EMR has their own proprietary data formats which are incompatible with modules from most other EMRs...or at best, require an expensive format-shifting module. For many physicians, EMRs are more trouble, not less - as they have to deal with tons of incompatible formats and halfassed implementations. I don't even want to get into the ICD-9 > ICD-10 > ICD-11 shift... All these systems do for now is leech money from providers and create a cottage industry of training, upgrades, and modules to sell. It does not improve patient care; at times it can be a threat to it.
The only proper solution will take an act of Congress, sadly. To require a single, completely open, unencumbered, universal, extensible, privacy respecting/encrypted, format for electronic medical records (and all facets thereof, from scheduling, to patient information, notes, etc..) - and then stipulate that all public insurance programs (ie Medicare etc..) will ONLY accept said format. Thus, you can use any EMR provider that you want, but they will all support the universal OpenEMR format. This is the only way to bring the original impetus behind switching to EMRs to fruition. I'd love to see the government mandate that the formats of GNU Health ( https://health.gnu.org/ ), the Free Software EMR would be used as a baseline for required standardization, as well as using a solution used GnuPG to help encrypt said records (patients have public and private keys as do physicians/practitioners, allowing complete control and traceability who has access to protected health info, who's making changes, and when). Until then, we shouldn't expect Apple or anyone else to have a myriad of applications that monitor and ostensibly involve themselves in the patient's health, yet report unknown and unknowable amounts of data in random forms to all sorts of individuals and somehow consider them to be in the best interest of the patient.
The other half of this equation is privacy; sadly something it seems we're losing more and more each day. Patient health data is already hugely mined and monetized; your pharmacy is selling your data to insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. These same industries are buying your browsing habits and what you search, to try to figure who has X condition that will cost them money. The amount of privacy that a user can give up more or less unknowingly (or cryptically hidden behind innocuous seeming requests and permissions) simply by installing an application for iOS/Android is enormous - expanding this to health any further is a nauseating prospect in my mind. Lets not forget that even when som
Now the can literately do what they figuratively do when someone buys a Apple product.
Apple Watch with it's Taptic Engine will do for Porn what the iPod did for Music.
Men will strap Apple Watch to their "Johnson".
Women will undo the strap and insert the Apple Watch up their "Uh Oh 1" or "Un Oh 2" holes.
Then the magic of the Taptic Engine gives the greatest orgasm ever to it's owners.
The Porn Industry heavy weights are now lining up in Cupertino to get a license.
Yee Haa
RE: ResearchKit, which is aimed at connecting medical researchers with voluntary subjects who are willing to submit anonymous data.
Pull the other one.
No such thing as anonymous data.
That's today. Do you really think they're going to leave it at that? Consumer demand is enough to assure that in the future such devices will report their measurement to the user directly - once one does it, all the companies will have to do it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
So when they fail to innovate real things, they will fall back on the good old quackery and try to make people believe that Apple will prevent and cure all kinds of deceases?
That's today. Do you really think they're going to leave it at that?
Leave it at WHAT? The whole POINT, again, is that ResearchKit forwards data to researchers. Doing anything with diagnosis is utterly alien to it's purpose. It does not matter "how far" they take ResearchKit, because that direction is not nor will it ever be diagnosis...
HealthKit is ALREADY how the user reviews any data collected. So there's no point in ResearchKit doing anything like that since HealthKit is where that feature already exists.
If you want to complain about HealthKit for letting people see their own data - well go ahead (though even that seems non-sensical to me). But the original misplaced tirade was against ResearchKit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When it was launched I found it more interesting than the watch which was presented at the same event.
I thought the same, I couldn't believe news about this was more widespread as it's really a far bigger deal in the long-term.
I also think that this initiative would not hace come from Jobs.
I think given his health problems he would have been rather big on ways to understand disease better so that his could have been prevented much earlier.
If lots and lots of people start gathering data over time, the history of which can be shared with researchers, perhaps there can be found some signs that you should have tests done early on for some conditions that get worse later...
And even habitually Apple bashing slashdotters must grudgingly respect that it is open source.
No they "must" not. If that were true they would have done so with WebKit, LLVM, etc. Instead they ignore these things, and secretly it makes them hate Apple even more.
One of the research areas was particularly interesting: it was if I remember well a study about asthma symptoms, and the participants phone location was used together with a grid of a few 1000 air polluants sensors in New york city
And samples taken by researchers from around the city too (scrapings from buildings and trash cans)! That was a really cool use of the technology to try and find more exactly what things may trigger attacks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple is a good UI company, and theyre quite good at taking existing technologies and making them more attractive to general consumers. But language like "frontier" implies that Apple blazes new paths. The problem is that if you were to consider the last few years, theres very little apple has innovated.
Apple pay? Preceeded by some 2 years by Google Wallet. Apple watch? Preceeded by a year by Google wear. Their entire iPhone 6 unveil consisted of demoing ideas that had been in wide usage for a year or more by other vendors.
I can understand the excitement, in the same way that BMW or Lexus enthusiasts might get excited over a new model-- but to then act like Lexus is leading the way in automotive engineering would be ridiculous.
and instead of seeing how the slippery slope of power led to the corruption of the individuals they thought to themselves, "I want to get me some of that".
The headline could be a John Mayer song.
Oye, oye, oye?
You control a friends "Oye", and your friend does the same for you. Don't worry if you don't have one, there's a flying Sect-Oye drone approaching you from behind you now. Your avatar looks like a bigger than life body part?
As to nervous nellies, I have to ask if that was translated from Japanese. When the serious problems developed in 2011, a software-translated news article that I saw contained the phrase "nervous reactors". Hope that your Sext-Oyes don't have nervous batteries.
Amazing the way Apple convinces people that they invented things. For who did not know, Apple did not invent: the smart watch, the smart phone, tablet computing, the GUI, the personal computer, online music stores, mp3 players; or much of anything.
There are already watch devices that can take your pulse. They have been around for some time.
Medical industries is one of Project Ara's main focuses.
This is how the Borg got their start.
The watch doesn't go beyond measuring heart rates.
And actitvy also.
We are Apple. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own.
Can I get my iBrain?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!