The Apple Watch and health studies.
(Science Week – Day 6!)
Three years ago, Apple made time in one of their super-hypey product announcement events to talk about something totally unrumoured: medical research.
Watch it if you like, but what’s apparent is that after filling the world with iPhones, they found themselves in a position to enable populations to donate large amounts of health data – much larger and more consistent than those typical of scientific health studies. Even more so with their watch, which many already choose to track and log their heart rate. This segment wasn’t tethered to any kind of industry-exploding, revenue-driving product announcement that I could see.
They’ve since turned this into a large-scale study, and the first article I’ve found surfaced that some analysis suggested a significant correlation between heart data and diabetes. That’s the one I’ll link below. A suggestion isn’t necessarily world-changing either, but all of this seems to paint an encouraging picture of a world in which much better research is becoming possible.
Rigorous collection of enough data to be unbiased and reveal any sort of statistical significance has always been gruelling and tedious, and often results deserving to reach the public are from meta-analyses of this humdrum (e.g. “we’ve looked at 30 studies from different countries and 29 of them found that oranges don’t poison you, while the last one included two people who said they felt a little weird and one who had a headache").
With technology’s maturity, undoubtedly new and creative ways to combine data will emerge as others “find themselves” in similar positions.