The Apple Health Revolution
I had initially written this article on the heels of WWDC 2019, for some reason I didn’t publish it (reason: unknown). A lot has changed since then and the focus and importance of telehealth has increased exponentially in the last couple of months. I’m anticipating even more health-related announcements during this year’s WWDC and I’ll be writing a follow-up article following that. Enjoy!
Imagine waking up every morning and having a doctor by your bedside giving you updates and recommendations on your health? Helping you tweak your habits on a daily basis to ensure you stay at optimal health and know enough about you that when things start to hit a potential red zone prompt you to seek help
WWDC 2019 has brought about some important announcements from Apple with regards to health and wellness. Behind the great additions of the Apple Designed Menstrual Cycle tracking App and the Noise Detection feature lies an even more powerful set of building blocks that Apple is using to grow a potentially revolutionary set of services for consumers in years to come.
Slight tweaks and additions to the platform this year point to a bigger set of features that will make the iPhone and Apple Watch strong proponents to helping you stay healthy and letting you know if you aren’t.
The shift to trends analysis and personal coaching over statistical information is a huge first step because it familiarizes us with getting advise from our phones
The features above (Activity trends and Summary view) represent the first key step to turning your iPhone into your personal doctor, someone that is always with you and able to provide you with a snapshot view of how you are faring on a day to day basis. Previously the Health app was only used to log data from your devices and display them with little to no analysis other than your own interpretation, the shift to trends analysis and personal coaching over displaying information is a huge first step because it familiarizes us with getting advise from our phones. Right now the activity trends are limited only to exercise but with an expanding portfolio of health information, smarter analysis parameters and an increasingly powerful handheld device (iPhone in this case) to process this information quicker, our phones could start to help you with your health and giving us a better understanding of ourselves.
Tele-health and Physiotherapy at Home
To further emphasize this shift, we can look at a couple of features that are now open to developers, ARKit 3 and watchOS - extended access to watch sensors
The interesting thing about these development features is it opens up the possibilities for Tele-health. Tele-health is being able to be at home and still be able to connect with your doctor or physician. The current barriers to the success of tele-health is it is currently limited to consultations but what if you could send your doctor your vitals, recovery status and progress while never leaving your home?
This is where the interplay between the Extended Runtime app and the ARKit 3 Motion Capture comes into play. By having a specific physiotherapy app running on the Apple Watch, the app would be able to track your movements to ensure you are doing the right exercises, and a recording of your movements using the ARKit would be able to analyze things such as posture, exercise adherence and range of motion (in the physiotherapy case). With this further analysis could be done to track your progress and allow you to be in control of your health. A successful example of how this implementation of an AR based app for training would work is HomeCourt. A basketball training app that uses AR through your iPhone to analyze things such as shot type, release angle, vertical to help improve your basketball game.
Health Services
With the increase of watch-only apps and access to the watch sensors, more health-focused applications could start to come about. The array of features that Apple is putting into the Apple Watch will start to show more in the next few years and will be impossible to ignore. Currently, the Apple Watch is already being used for various medical studies and this will only increase in future and even get to the point of automated health services, where as a user, the Apple Watch and the combination of processing power in the iPhone reading and analyzing this information in real-time, we will be able to receive real-time notifications and suggestions on any abnormalities and slight nudging to perform certain tasks to ensure that you stay in a healthy zone with regards to your health.
2020 updated thoughts
The current COVID-19 crisis has lead to an increased emphasis on healthcare and the implementation of remote services for continued monitoring. It’s actually made our technology and how we use it more important. Could we be using our devices, our technology more effectively to combat the onset of COVID-19 and any future diseases? Continuous improvement and understanding your health is key to combatting disease and health deterioration and the platform Apple is building could potentially help us in our daily lives. The recent collaboration between Apple and Google around the Exposure Notification specification and framework has shown how much of a shift, in importance, we have taken towards health in the last few months. I anticipate a lot of the focus for this year’s developer conference will focus on creating solutions that will help us monitor and combat this pandemic on an individual level to help a collective good.
