Is the Apple Watch a Useful Medical Device? (Video)

Video Is the Apple Watch a Useful Medical Device? (Video) 47

Posted by Roblimo on Thursday March 26, 2015 @02:18PM from the all-we-want-is-for-you-to-be-happy-happy-happy dept.

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Let's kill the suspense right away by answering the title question, 'Probably not.' For one thing, according to interviewee Alfred Poor, the Apple Watch is in no way linked to the Apple Research Kit. Dr. Poor is editor of the Health Tech Insider website, so he follows this kind of thing more carefully than most people. And the Apple watch is not the only device mentioned in this video (or transcript, if you prefer reading to listening). If you want to ruminate about the possibility of direct mind control, for instance, you need to know about the Thync, whose vendor calls it 'A groundbreaking wearable device that enables you to shift your state of mind in minutes.' They say it 'induces on-demand shifts in energy, calm, or focus.' It even has a 'pleasure' setting. Crank that to 11 and you might happily spend your days prone, being fed by a drip and emptied by a catheter, moving only when an attendant turns you over to keep bedsores from developing -- not that you'll care if they do -- as you spend the rest of your life in an artificially-induced joyful stupor.

Robin Miller: This is Alfred Poor, an old friend of ours. He is now the editor of the Health Tech Insider website, so he is keeping a really good finger on the pulse of new wearable medical devices that are hitting the market hard and heavy. And let’s start with – let’s go alphabetically here. Apple, they are near the beginning. So what’s the deal with the Apple watch and their research and all that?

Alfred Poor: Well, I mean part of the problem is no one has yet seen a production Apple Watch in the wild yet as far as I know.

Robin Miller: Oh.

Alfred Poor: And so we don’t really know what it can do. The early indications are that it has got more sensors than your average watch. It’s going to be able to provide more biometric kinds of information that could indeed be very helpful for health and medical research applications. But until you can actually put down your $350 or $15,000 to get one, we’re not really going to know just what it can do.

Robin Miller: Well, we know it can suck your wallet dry.

Alfred Poor: We know that. We know that. And it looks sharp. But aside from that we’re just not quite sure what it can do. One of the problems with the recent announcement, I watched the big announcement they had. And one of the problems that’s going on in the media is that the media seems to be conflating all this information about research kit, and linking it to Apple Watch – which I don’t see the connection. As I understand it, and I admit that my understanding may be flawed, but my understanding of research kit is that it is an Apple iOS only platform for essentially developing questionnaires that medical researchers can use to get information from test subjects. It means they have to have an iPad or an iPhone in order to be able to participate. One of the things about this is that it’s – yeah, it’s a great idea to be able to collect a lot of information from a lot of people, however, I am not convinced that this is going to have a lot of traction in the serious scientific research community.

Robin Miller: Well, wait a minute. If you just have one of those web browser things, can’t you access all kinds of searches – like Survey Monkey? And lots of others?

Alfred Poor: Sure. Yeah. The idea that it’s built – it is built designed so that it can link to Apple’s health kit, which can gather some information that iPhones and other devices can record and store. So there is some link to the medical side of things. But the fact is that serious researchers don’t use self-selecting test groups, you know, and in this case you have to have an iPhone, you have to have the app and the you have to be willing to, I mean automatically it’s limiting the population that you’re going to try to reach. For some kinds of research I can see how reaching a general population that’s motivated and interested in participating could be good. But again I am not sure just how much serious clinical research type work this is going to result in. The other part of it is it’s not linked to the Apple Watch at all. So it is in theory, the Apple Watch sensors will be able to generate data that can be recorded and used in the research kit. But research kit isn’t an Apple Watch product and it’s not a, they are just one can’t work with the other. If the research kit is tied to anything it’s tied to the iPhone.

Robin Miller: Big data and health research often are spoken of together like a horse and carriage.

Alfred Poor: Yeah. And big data really is the pot of gold at the end of the wearables rainbow. We’ve already started seeing it some large corporations and some health insurance companies have issued employees with fit bits and other health tracking devices, pretty much on an opt-in basis at this point, on an experimental basis. But the idea being that they will be able to gather large amounts of data nominally depersonalized but so that they can see trends and patterns that can predict either positive or negative outcomes that are going to affect the health costs of these people. And so that would give them information, give the company information that they could use to encourage the behaviors that will end up costing them less as far as health costs go. And so it’s a great idea. There are a lot of problems between here and there. Depersonalization of data really isn’t possible.

Robin Miller: It’s not?

Alfred Poor: Oh no, not at all. I mean, I don’t know if you remember the story but there was a teenage girl who got a postcard in the mail trying to sell baby clothes to her. Based on things she bought, they figured out that she was probably pregnant.

It really doesn’t take too much data to triangulate and get down to an individual. I mean, even just take straight demographics. You know if you’re looking for somebody, some married male between 60 and 65 living in my zip code, there are not a lot of us. And it only takes a couple of other data points to narrow it down to me and a couple other people or just me alone. So the question of depersonalization is a tough one, especially when you have standards like HIPAA their privacy of medical data in there. Another problem is the accuracy of the data that is being collected. For example there are some studies showing that some of these devices are only plus or minus 20% in terms of that they measure, right. And for those of don’t know anything about scientific measurement you multiply your margin of error.

Robin Miller: Yes.

Alfred Poor: So a couple of 20%s, and all of a sudden you’ve got meaningless data.

Robin Miller: Yeah, meaningless data in most fields once you hit 5%.

Alfred Poor: Yeah, 5% is additional experimental error for more scientific work but 20 just ruins your data very quickly. So there is the accuracy, there is question of privacy and – but I’m still very optimistic about it. I believe that in the long run, I believe – oh and the other part is, is the device actually measuring what you think it’s measuring? Right now things like steps, we kind of measure that, but we’re getting new devices. Some of these are on the Apple Watch, and some are on the other wearable devices but they are going to start measuring things like blood sugar, blood glucose, they are going to be measuring blood pressure, either relative or absolute, they are going to be measuring EKG, the heart traces -- not just measuring the heart beat but actually the traces of the heartbeat, galvanic skin response, I mean there is just a whole bunch of things, new kinds of sensors, that these devices are going to incorporate and it’s going to take some careful and clinical kinds of studies to find out how accurate they are and whether they are actually measuring what you think they are measuring under all conditions.

One of the cool things for diabetes – there is some disagreement as to the clinical accuracy of it -- but as it turns out your tears can be used as a method of measuring the sugar level in your tears, which can be extrapolated, some believe, to your blood levels. Google is working on a contact lens that will do this but there are other groups I believe, I think it’s University of Waterloo up in Canada is one of the places that’s working on a smart contact lens that can wirelessly and continuously monitor glucose levels. You see, part of the problem with finger pricks, is that it is just a snapshot in time. The four or five times or whatever number of times a day that you do it. So it’s invasive and it’s just a snapshot. For a longitudinal study, we’re talking about clinical measurements that may be taken four times a year or on a normal, healthy person once a year or less. So

Robin Miller: They want you in once a year no matter what. The VA is saying they want you in once a year.

Alfred Poor: But the beauty is that if we can get these devices collecting the information 24/7, you have a much finer granularity, you’ll be able to see incidents that would may not be caught and if you’re taking that one snapshot once or four times a year, and so there would be a lot more information to work from, and yeah, it’s going to lead to a whole lot of very exciting and useful kinds of gains, I just think that it’s not going to happen next year or five years from now, and we were talking more like a 10-year and beyond kind of window to get that to happen.

Robin Miller: Okay, well. Still stuff to look forward to, so what’s out there?

Alfred Poor: One of my favorite devices that people are talking about is a thing called the THYNC, T-H-Y-N-C, okay, and this is a head band that you strap on, and then you dial up what you want for your mood, do you want to be focused, do you want to be energized, do you want be relaxed, so you just dial in to the controller I guess on your smartphone or whatever the interface is, and it will take care of that for you. How does that do it you might ask. What it does is what they delicately call transcranial electrical stimulation. They shock your brain directly, and so I mean at first blush that sounds a little bit weird, a little over the top and they’re sort of 1984-ish, but when you start looking at it I get a whole bunch of questions that come up, I mean first of all why should electrical stimulation be better or worse than chemical stimulation, how is this different in your double shot Starbucks that you start your day with? And then how should this – should this be regulated, how should it be regulated? And what happens when they add a fourth choice on the dial... it’s pleasure, you know, we are right into Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Are people going to end up putting one of these things on and dialing up pleasure and spending all day doing that?

Robin Miller: I’ve read that science fiction story many times actually.

Alfred Poor: Yeah, and so it’s becoming real, I mean this is a product that is very close to production it’s been tested with thousands and thousands of subjects, and so it's ready to sell to the general public.

Robin Miller: Is it invasive or does everything stay outside?

Alfred Poor: It just sits on top and it’s dry electrodes, so you’re not even having to gel yourself up.

Robin Miller: Oh, my.

Alfred Poor: Just pop it on and there you go. I actually used a different device – I’d written about it on Health Tech Insider, but I actually got to witness it firsthand at CES this past January, and I was actually able to control a slot car with my thoughts. I was able to make it stop and go actually won a race against somebody else by making my car go faster, but it’s part of the goal of that is to provide people who are paralyzed or have other disabilities to be able to interface with devices using their thoughts which is obviously a very powerful and laudable kind of project, but again the implications go beyond that and what do we want or not want to do using control by thoughts?

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