“The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the [mobile phone] industry, the iPhone is less relevant. … Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won’t make a mark on the industry.” — Bloomberg News: Jan. 14, 2007
Back in 2007, suffice it to say that not everyone was bullish on Apple’s iPhone. Today, the same is true with respect to the Apple Watch. Some believe it will revolutionize health care, others are already calling it an “epic fail.” I recently received an Apple Watch as a gift and thought I’d share my impressions on the first three health care-related features I found.
1. Heart rate (beats per minute). My first approach to learning how to use the Apple Watch was to fiddle with it. Through “fiddling,” I quickly discovered the first health-related feature: its ability to measure my heartbeats per minute (BPM). My Apple Watch clocked me in at 102 BPM.
For some reason, that seemed high to me. My wife is a nurse practitioner, so I asked her what a normal BPM would be for someone like me. She thought my resting heart beat should be about 80 beats per minute and encouraged me to drink a glass of water because dehydration can cause the heart to beat faster. A couple glasses of water later and I was down to 78 beats per minute. It may sound silly, but I’m planning to keep an eye on this number.
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2. iPhone’s Health app. Having reached the limits of what I could learn just by fiddling, I turned to Google for advice on how to use my new watch. That is where I learned about the Health app, which is not actually on the watch, but instead on the iPhone.
The Health app seems to serve as a medical record for the user. When I first opened it, I was presented with a dashboard filled with graphs showing me how many steps I’d taken and how far I’d gone over the past several days. Digging a little deeper, I found that the app can record, store and graph additional categories of health care data for me, ranging from my blood type to my copper levels. Under the “Heart Rate” category, the app was automatically collecting and charting data form my Apple Watch.
3. HealthKit. But what about all of those other categories? I wondered if Apple really thought I was going to start typing data into those every day. Then I found HealthKit.
HealthKit is an Apple creation that allows the sharing of health and fitness information. Medical providers and other companies that store or collect your information can elect to share it with you, on your iPhone, and you can elect to share information back with them. This way, even if you have medical providers at different hospitals and also use at-home devices to collect information, it is possible to have all of your information stored and presented in one place.
Epic, the leading electronic medical record software company, offers a HealthKit integration and many of its hospital clients are already piloting it. Other companies, like Withings, have included HealthKit integrations in products such as wireless blood pressure monitors.
Those predicting that Apple Watch will be an “epic fail” may be right. Health care consumers who want more control over their health care information, however, are likely to root for its success.
Date: September 9, 2015