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.