Apple is close to adding a glucose monitor to their Watch!

[thewayne]

This is very cool. Assuming it's sufficiently accurate, this will be a heck of a game-changer for diabetics. And accuracy is pretty important for this! My Apple Watch does a three-lead ECG to check for AFib, measures my pulse, and SpO2. The pulse and SpO2 results are very comparable to my BP machine's reading and a finger pulse oxymeter with both devices measuring pulse rate. Of course, the accuracy of home medical equipment vs the equipment in a medical practice is always subject to debate.

Temperature is expected to be added at some point. People would like to see BP measured by the watch, but that's very difficult as normally that's measured by a vein being listened to collapsing and re-opening.

https://www.engadget.com/apple-watch-no-prick-blood-glucose-monitor-200137031.html

Comments

[richardf8]

This scares the shit out of me. It's an endpoint that allows the payer-provider agglomerates to insert their panoptic gaze into our bodies, and decide to fuck with us on the basis of what will best serve their business models while pretending they give a damn about us.

Why is it always the Huxley and Orwell visions that become reality and never the Asimov or Roddenberry?

[thewayne]

While I see your point and agree with it to a degree, giving diabetics near real-time monitoring of their sugars - NON-INVASIVELY - is very important if you have that disease.  Apple currently has a very good record of user privacy, though not perfect.  Much better than Google's.  And you're absolutely right, it would be nice if the Asimov and Roddenberry futures were the ones that were coming true.

[richardf8]

AceLightning73's "cardiologist" comment is very much on the nose. Apple's privacy protections are excellent, but the concern is less what Apple will do with it than what third parties might seek to entice/coerce a user to do. A payer can easily say hey! Download our app, give us access to this data stream, and if we like what we see, we won't price you out of coverage.

[thewayne]

Absolutely agree.  The solution is to massively overhaul our health care industry so that it becomes a national service, and the number of middle layers are mostly eliminated.  When the Apple Watch was introduced and gained fitness tracking features, there were health plans that supposedly offered discounts to watch how you exercise and gave discounts.  But I haven't heard of that recently, I expect it fell by the wayside. Now ask me how likely I think it is that the USA will get a single-payer health care system.  The number is very, very low.

[acelightning73]

I have seen a lot of ads for continuous glucose monitoring devices - some will work with any smart phone. I'd love to stop puncturing my fingertip every morning, but they're expensive, and then I'd have to buy a smart phone.

And the deeper question is, who's going to have access to all this information about our bodies?

[thewayne]

Yep, medical privacy is definitely a big issue, especially here in the USA where it seems to be largely ignored. I had dinner with an old friend several times last week, he now lives in Mexico - we were both in Phoenix.  He has been having a lot of problems with his mother's death last year - bad dreams, poor sleep - and was put on a couple of meds.  HIS DOCTOR CALLED HIM and told him he was sleeping too much, and to lay off a med or two for a couple of days!  Friend's Apple Watch reports to his doc, something set up by my friend. Something like that I think is good, but the way the government has let medical middle men get inveigled into health insurance and the entire system here is not remotely controlled.

[acelightning73]

My cardiologist likes to yell at me. I can imagine I'm enjoying something tasty, and he calls me and demands to know what i'm eating, it's making my blood sugar go up unacceptably. Nope!

[thewayne]

Fortunately stuff like that I'm sure would be opt-in and a manual configuration before it streamed to your doc.

[acelightning73]

A smart watch that monitors blood chemistry, pulse rate, and other parameters would appeal to people who need to follow strict limits on these readings, but for an ordinary person they'd just be invasive.

[thewayne]

Agreed.  Apple is very good about opt-in vs opt-out.  You don't have to share anything that you don't want to.

[disneydream06]

Interesting.
Who needs a doctor any more. lol......
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Considering some of the medical failures that I've heard of doctors recently, maybe....

[disneydream06]

I agree. :o

[silveradept]

That would be a welcome piece of technology, assuming that it can measure sufficiently accurately for those who have to monitor their blood sugar. It will be even more welcome if the person doing the monitoring is the person who has control over the data and who gets to choose who, if anyone to share it with.

[thewayne]

I don't know how critical spot-on accuracy is for diabetics.  Would a 5% swing be close enough?  Do they base how much insulin to inject based on these readings?  I don't have any first-hand experience with diabetes.

[silveradept]

I don't have first hand experience, but for things like insulin, the reading is very important to the dosage needed. And to figuring out what direction to go in for correcting into a good sugar level, by adding or taking away. So less swing is better.