Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
The newest Apple Watch can now flag potential problems with your heartbeat - a feature that's been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration and that Apple is marking as a major achievement. But some doctors said that including heart-monitoring tools in such a popular consumer product could prompt unnecessary anxiety and medical visits.
The company touted its heart-tracking feature as proof that the watch can help people proactively manage their health "The Apple Watch has become the intelligent guardian for your health," Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who oversees the development of the Apple Watch, said in the company's presentation of new Apple products this week.
[...] The FDA has cleared Apple's device as a Class II medical device, meaning that it is intended to diagnose or treat a medical condition and poses a minimal risk to use. (Other Class II devices include some powered wheelchairs and pregnancy kits, according to the FDA website.) In its letter to Apple clearing the feature, the FDA listed as a risk factor the potential for mistakenly flagging a problem, prompting unneeded treatment.
Source: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/What-cardiologists-think-about-the-Apple-Watch-s-13230271.php
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The use of Apple Watches in medical studies now includes research into eating disorders. Apple is donating 1,000 smartwatches to a University of North Carolina study (the Binge Eating Genetics Initiative, or BEGIN) that will help understand bulimia nervosa patients and others with binge eating behavior. The wristwear will track heart rates over a month-long period to see if there are any spikes ahead of binging incidents. If there are, it might be possible to alert caregivers and patients before these acts take place.
They either have too many unwanted smartwatches laying around, or want doctors to prescribe the Apple Watch treatment.
Also at 9to5Mac and Fast Company.
Related: Apple's Watch Can Detect an Abnormal Heart Rhythm With 97% Accuracy, UCSF Study Says
Apple Watch Could be Used to Detect Hypertension and Sleep Apnea
FDA Approves First Medical Device Accessory for the Apple Watch
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What Cardiologists Think About the Apple Watch's Heart-Tracking Feature
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Monday September 17 2018, @02:39AM (6 children)
lays in the hand of those who control access.
I have had a number of "frustrated" medics telling myself and my colleagues that "access to genomic information will be a disaster". I'll not say when that statement was, but you'd all be surprised if I told you the audience.
Nevertheless, of course we should have the best quality data, especially with medicine a limited resource everywhere.
However, medicine is *massively* in need of a revolution - a vast amount of "normal" data is needed for *every* human before we can say something is abnormal.
The biggest problem with hospitals is they are full of *sick* people!!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday September 17 2018, @02:47AM (5 children)
I Am Absolutely Serious. My understanding is that it costs about a grand to sequence someone's DNA these days. That I haven't had it done already is largely because whenever I am in possession of a grand I find some way to spend it instead on hookers and blow.
While I can readily see that could cause problems for me, what I hope to achieve by doing so is to facilitate the development of an actual cure for my mental illness.
There is no cure for my Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder, nor is there any hoped-for cure on the horizon. The best that can be done is to treat my symptoms.
In addition to that, I do far, far better than all but a very few who share my diagnosis. Surely there is some reason for that; perhaps that reason can be discerned by studying my DNA.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by opinionated_science on Monday September 17 2018, @03:12AM (1 child)
use a health equity account. You can use the tax-free $$ to get a genome sequenced, assuming you can find a medic articulate enough to support the request.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday September 17 2018, @04:25AM
I'll do just that.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Monday September 17 2018, @03:42AM
Well, when someone perfects cloning, you can be happy knowing they could make a new you (although then you get inot experience vs genetics in making you you)
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 17 2018, @09:35AM (1 child)
More like a $100. And it's coming down. Soon tech that existed in gattica will be reality.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/10/illumina-wants-to-sequence-your-whole-genome-for-100/ [techcrunch.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 17 2018, @02:21PM
From your linked article:
>a new machine that the company says is “expected one day” to order up your whole genome for less than $100.
That is to say, today (2 years ago when the article was written) it costs nowhere remotely close to $100. But eventually, if all their aspirations are met, it might.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday September 17 2018, @02:43AM (1 child)
"The Apple product has become the intelligent guardian for your existence."
I can see many benefits to a wearable device that can do EKGs. What doesn't excite me is that it comes from the world's wealthiest corporation.
As a Mac developer, I spend my entire day with Apple products. I'd have a whole lot more enthusiasm about this device if it came from some small startup.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by kanweg on Monday September 17 2018, @09:49PM
Not me. I trust Apple more with my data (because they collect so few and mostly anonymous) than any other big or small corporation. It is not Apple's business model. You pay (heavily) for the product, but you're not the product. Apple has put its heels in the sand quite a few times when it came to defend privacy matters.
As to small start-ups, if (IF) they start a business model with anonymity, it often doesn't take long when they get bigger that they change the rules.
Bert
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday September 17 2018, @02:53AM (1 child)
Potentially it will prevent more unnecessary visits than it causes.
In my particular case, not often but quite rarely I experience Somatic Illness. Note that Somatic Illness is quite different from Psychosomatic Illness.
There was a time I was completely convinced that I had Tachycardia - a dangerously fast pulse. But an EKG showed my heart was normal.
This wasn't a simple delusion; I could feel my heart racing in my chest.
(Psychosomatic illnesses are _real_ diseases - cancer or infections that will kill you for example - that are ultimately of mental origin. This really _does_ happen; the mechanism is not yet understood but it is thought that the brain has the power to weaken one's own immune system. That Psychosomatic Illness is real was demonstrated by a striking study in which volunteers with the very worst kinds of warts - all over their entire bodies - were given the post-hypnotic suggestion that their warts would disappear from just one-half of their bodies. That really did happen to them, thereby lending credence to the commonly-claimed assertion that while warts are largely incurable, they can be _wished_ away.)
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday September 17 2018, @06:07PM
[Citation needed.] And I do very firmly believe that mental and spiritual outlook can very much affect the body and vice-versa, and that health - as a concept - lies within the mind. But still, give me a reliable journal source to that story, please.
But reread the last half of that article - this has an equal capability to scare patients into believing they have AFib when it is only a false reading. (Plus atrial fibrillation can certainly be serious but by all indications I've seen many, many people live with it without any effect in their lives for a LONG time).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 17 2018, @06:59AM (1 child)
Know that someday you will die. Enjoy life to its fullest. Do the right thing.
A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will comes.
That is all
(Score: 1) by Goghit on Thursday September 20 2018, @07:15PM
How many times does an Anonymous Coward die?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday September 17 2018, @10:16AM
The ultimate privacy is the thoughts in our own heads that we don't write down, but the penultimate privacy is our DNA and medical data. As a technical person I love data, and the more, the better. As a technical person, I know how easy it is for data to be stolen. So I would love to have this kind of data, but I would never in a million years give a company like Apple access to it. I wouldn't give any company access to it.
Even if the company somehow, miraculously, did not skimp on its security, I could never trust them to never hire MBAs. MBAs have no scruples, no integrity whatsoever, and would sell all our most intimate medical data if it meant they could buy that new Porsche. No ironclad contract, no law in the world would prevent them, because they would most likely never be caught. Even if they were, it would be far too late. The second party would already have sold the data on, because that's what they do.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by ngarrang on Tuesday September 18 2018, @03:14PM
This is the last great frontier of the democratization of information. Computers and information processing and storage have become sufficiently advanced that doctors feel threatened. Add to the list of music labels and book publishers.