Apple's Next Frontier Is Your Body 98
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.
Flashing on Sanford and son (Score:1)
"It's the biggest one", cook said when Lamont asked to borrow $100. "I'm coming Louise".
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And he says "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it"
And the hype begins... (Score:2)
There's a name for this. (Score:4, Insightful)
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!*
Re:There's a name for this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Money.
Lots of money.
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Hmm...you mean Apple wants into that arena to make money? Those bastards!
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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!*
Humans.
ResearchKit is not HealthKit (Score:4, Informative)
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 [github.io] so there can be ResearchKit clients for Android too...
Re:There's a name for this. (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding with regards to what ResearchKit is about. It's not HealthKit, which is aimed at helping people to be healthier. It's ResearchKit, which is aimed at connecting medical researchers with voluntary subjects who are willing to submit anonymous data. As it is right now, researchers seeking data on how well a treatment affects a disease need to first seek out people with that disease, then they need to either bring those subjects into a doctor's office to be tested, which is typically done on an infrequent basis, or they need to rely on self-reporting out in the field. There are numerous flaws in those methodologies, leading to all sorts of lies, omissions, and other forms of error creeping in. And that's the best we've had to rely on up until now. Plus, response rates are ridiculously low since there's no great way to put researchers in touch with potential subjects, and even when potential subjects are aware of the research, most don't want to deal with the hassle.
By increasing awareness, taking the hassle out of it, and even promising to open source ResearchKit, Apple is providing a foundation on which researchers can finally address those issues. They're putting the diagnostic tools directly into our smart devices, and are doing so across any platform, thus allowing the researchers to get frequently-collected data from subjects under actual conditions, rather than having to rely on faulty self-reporting or infrequent lab visits. They can also get a much wider swath of data, allowing them to have more certainty about their results, along with a better understanding of what "normal" looks like. Even if a hypochondriac is using an app that relies on ResearchKit, it's a win for all of us, since it helps to establish more baseline readings from which we can better understand how our bodies are supposed to be behaving when we're in the real world, rather than in a lab. Moreover, it may eventually help to establish a baseline reading for them, which could then be used to show them that their readings are in line with where they were before when we knew they were well.
All of which is to say, this has nothing at all to do with people fretting about being sick, and has everything to do with helping research doctors better understand diseases and how the treatments they are providing address them. Joke about it if you want, but it sounds like a worthy goal to me.
A new generation of hypochondriacs (Score:2, Funny)
Just as the Internet has enabled people to "self-diagnose" all sorts of illnesses they don't have cyberchondria [wikipedia.org], 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.
How does it do that? In fact it cannot. (Score:2)
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.
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ResearchKit is still not HealthKit (Score:2)
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 ex
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According to the internet, every symptom may indicate cancer.
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According to the internet, every symptom may indicate cancer.
Makes sense - after all, everything causes cancer in lab mice :-)
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According to Doctors, every symptom may indicate cancer.
Oooh.... (Score:3)
Sounds kinky.
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Unfortunately for your fantasies, they will probably limit themselves to the right hand or the forehead, like the original plan went [biblehub.com].
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"Apple's Next Frontier Is Your Body"
Sounds kinky.
Unfortunately for your fantasies, they will probably limit themselves to the right hand or the forehead, like the original plan went [biblehub.com].
So if the mark of the beast is an apple emblem, does that make apple the forbidden fruit?
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- apple is bitten, like in the genesis story
- apple I retailed for 666 dollars and 66 cents
As the saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence...
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...will be health issues and obsession with health.
Why exactly is this bad? Weren't we making fun of the fatties just last week?
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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.
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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.
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... non-removable?
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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.
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Alrighty then.
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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?
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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.
my body (Score:2, Insightful)
mobile-health industry... (Score:1)
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.
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Just them?
You can add "yeah, but on a STEAM engine" if you go back far enough. Fun fact: if you look at some old drawings of Watt steam engines, you can see a pecliar sun-and-planet gear arrangement instead of a crank because someone patented the use of a crank ON A STEAM ENGINE. For bonus points they patented it after it was already in use, but that didn't stop them litigating.
Patents have basically been broken since their inception.
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Watt was just as bad himself: As soon as he came up with that peculiar gear arrangement he patented it himself.
Watt delayed steam tech by some years. He wasn't willing to work on high-pressure steam research himself - he regarded it as too dangerous, with the tendency of early high-pressure engines to explode if you sneezed around them - but he did use his many patents to drive out of business anyone who did start developing high-pressure technology.
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Too bad they completely open-sourced research kit already.
The next big disease ... (Score:2)
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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 fo
Your body.... (Score:3, Funny)
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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!
It comes from other sensors (Score:4, Informative)
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 [cnet.com].
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The watch doesn't go beyond measuring heart rates.
And actitvy also.
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I'll be buggered if I let apple stick anything up my backside
You certainly would be.
It's all over (Score:4, Funny)
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Ain't nobody going to install pentabular screws in my body.
It's hard to find a good picture of the thing but my Ponto hearing aid [oticonmedical.com] looks like a rounded Torx variant. And I'm OK with having only the doctor have the screwdriver for it.
Are we this stupid? (Score:1)
Apple's Next Frontier Is Your Body
A good initiative (Score:2)
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 c
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Idea likely started with Jobs (Score:2)
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 histo
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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.
Jobs was the kind of guy to consult his guru first regarding health problems. Or various other alternative-medicine corn-eating billed critters. That's part of what killed him.
Apple what? (Score:2)
only over my dead... and that's already assigned to students teaching/research. Sorry Apple hype.
Rewritten (Score:2)
>"[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,
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Do they not notice how your Moto 270 tries and yet fails to have a circular display?
Not likely (Score:1)
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 produc
Apple Douche (Score:2)
You mean like a suppository phone? (Score:2)
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".
Not without privacy laws, open standards... (Score:4, Interesting)
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/ [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
This is why people get ticked @ apple products (Score:2)
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
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I can understand the excitement, in the same way that BMW or Lexus enthusiasts might get excited over a new model--
Wrong. I hate to keep having to say this. Apple is a Buick class company, in a Chevy world. They aren't any kind of BMW or even Lexus.
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I hate to keep having to say this.
No you don't. Saying silly things about Apple with no justification whatsoever is what you spend most of your time on Slashdot doing.
They watched Continuum (Score:2)
Apple late to the party, as usual? (Score:2)
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 it all starts (Score:2)
Where and when (Score:2)