Why the Apple Watch is (not) right (yet).
It is all about how one (Apple) will set foot in a new market. A market where you empower consumer electronics with the crucial task of monitoring one individual’s health, and extending it to society as a whole.
The Apple Watch, while presenting itself as a stylish accessory and a secure payment system is all about body activity tracking. Indeed, while serious money can be made presenting it as a social-status artefact or by collecting a toll on every digital payment transaction, Apple probably believes the real bounty to be in creating a truly cohesive wearable device that will track your physiological data, all of it networked to help enhance global healthcare practice.
For years most governments have been trying to control health expenditures by investing funds into new information technologies, not only to enhance healthcare management but health itself by stimulating prevention as well as increase professional expertise. For that you need to better track personal conditions, habits and health status.
And this also means billions if not trillions are at stake.
Indeed according to CMS estimates (http://cms.gov), the US healthcare expenditure alone could will reach 5 trillion dollars in 2022 from 2.8 in 2012, or roughly a 20% share of the GDP. Think about it translated worldwide. Many factors are causative of the increase including progress in medicine, broader and better treatments, improved diagnostic techniques, greater availability, and global increase of the population age. All of these we can’t readily restrain for obvious ethical reasons. But information technologies in health care is all about enhancing what we already have by increasing medical data coherence, offering 24/7 secure and trusty information availability and communication, while centralizing and dispatching medical knowledge where it can be best used.
Only a slight increase of efficiency will not only generate huge benefits for the patients, but also for states and tax payers. Not to forget for those who will provide the technology. It is crucial for states to control healthcare cost. And on contrary to social-status artefacts and overall consumption items, it is something citizens increasingly will not consider as dispensable.
For the technology provider it is in fact all about creating a trusted information middleman between the patient and the carer, making fair profit from both product and service. And while almost all technological conditions seem to have been met in the last decades, one crucial one isn’t yet: the wearable all-in-one tracking unit, the Physiology Processing Unit (PPU).
While the young Apple Watch has proved a well designed and marketed portable health tracking device could be successfull in capturing market shares (we will surely know more during next week’s WWDC), many things in its design could probably have been designed differently.
If you want to track body functions and physiology, you want it to be on you all the time, wherever you feel it be most comfortable, under any circumstance. This means not solely on your wrist. This is why Apple’s PPU shouldn’t be a watch, but some small discrete device with connecting abilities.
To be able to reach the physiological data where it is, it should have wireless connectivity with a broad sensor-array, all of which empowered with tracking specific environment, body and organ values. It should be able to securely digest and transfer the data to a centralized network repository, thus enabling knowledge-base confrontation and reviewing. And this is what the iPhone is currently in charge of.
So if we carefully look at what Apple has done with its first attempt at a PPU (the watch + the smartphone + the software foundation), it probably is the best technological compromise. It isn’t right but a good first step towards the real thing.
Until Apple (or alike) provides us with that secure and robust carry-at-all-times unit (implantable?), attached to multiple extensions (e.g. touchscreens, sensors, electrodes, diodes, injectors, …), the Apple Watch will not be right.
Comments and opinions welcome.
