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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.
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."
my frontier, not Apple's.
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.
We already had a South Park episode about this.
- Gronk!
Ain't nobody going to install pentabular screws in my body.
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.
I'll be buggered if I let apple stick anything up my backside
You certainly would be.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
...will be health issues and obsession with health.
Why exactly is this bad? Weren't we making fun of the fatties just last week?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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
>"[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
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
And he says "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it"
Yo dawg, would you like a douche in yo douche?
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
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.
i wonder how many device generations it will take before the apple watch just charges off of your body's ambient energy field.
Probably right before you die, so it can suck that last breath out of you. Then it will bring you directly to your iFuneral, since all the data about your death is already available, so no autopsy needed. People will be able to come and interact with simulations of you in your iCrypt that are generated from all the data they have on you out there. You are now an iPerson.
When your relatives tire of paying your simulacrums' upkeep, you will then be placed in the Apple Store and sold as a digital companion for $2.99.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
How is that actually supposed to work, though? Does the Apple Watch make people walk so much they gain weight? Does it make somebody see their doctor more regularly?
I'm asking because I don't remember WebMD ever getting raked over the coals on Slashdot.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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 non-removable Apple Watch begins blinking when you need to make a visit to the doctor. After 24 hours it starts beeping. Shortly thereafter it also beacons over a cellular link so the attendants can easily locate you.
This is entirely necessary. Healthcare has a social cost, and you need to be socially responsible about your health, citizen.
... non-removable?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
This is how the Borg got their start.
The watch doesn't go beyond measuring heart rates.
And actitvy also.
How is that actually supposed to work, though? Does the Apple Watch make people walk so much they gain weight?
As pointed out elsewhere you're off-topic. You're confusing ResearchKit with HealthKit and/or the Health app. But yes, one of the health app's functions is to encourage more activity such as walking, by feeding back how much activity you've done today against a target you've chosen. It's not a new idea, pedometers let you do this. But it looks to be a good implementation of it.
Can I get my iBrain?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Healthcare is a serious matter. The benefit from wearing a health monitor can only be fairly dispensed if all participants in the 'plan' are in compliance and wearing their health monitor.
Alrighty then.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The non-removable Apple Watch begins blinking when you need to make a visit to the doctor. After 24 hours it starts beeping. Shortly thereafter it also beacons over a cellular link so the attendants can easily locate you.
So battery life is no longer a problem all of a sudden?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.