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Apple is working on iPhone features to help detect depression, cognitive decline

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Re: Apple is working on iPhone features to help detect depression, cognitive decline

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No mystery. You can simply make the claim that Apple would detect anything that's anti-Apple. Why not? It isn't like that the company has anything approaching morality, aside from perhaps the occasional craziness from the worker-drones there.

It's too early for this. Or too late. I don't know. Not going to indulge this kind of "heavy on paranoia light on details" exchange where everything needs to be teased out. - Or maybe I should just take what you're saying at face value? That your assertion is Apple wants to monitor everything that everyone does that might hurt them then... arrest them with their police force? Shoot them with their army? Sic the polic…

Please don't cross into internet psychiatric diagnosis - it never does any good and is basically a form of personal attack, even if you didn't intend it that way.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Apple is working on iPhone features to help detect depression, cognitive decline

#122
post #40

Since most of the comments here seem to be on the hysterical side: 1. This is not something Apple is rolling out now with their devices and systems. 2. This is research being done by UCLA and BioNTech using Apple's various sensors. 3. There's nothing concerning here (yet). This is a common kind of research using novel sensors (either actually novel sensors or taking advantage of their now-pervasiveness). Webcams were…

>If the research finds that any of that data correlates with relevant mental-health conditions, the hope is to turn those signals into an app or feature that could warn people they might be at risk and prompt them to seek care I am worried about the part of article that mentions that they want to automate the analysis of the data to some degree and move it out a strictly clinical research setting. I have also done so…

So, because you’ve done research that’s the end of it? No one else can possibly do better? Game over guys. The guy on hacker news did his best so everyone else should just stop trying.

I for one, as a person that swings around with depression, would love something like this on my wrist.

Re: Apple is working on iPhone features to help detect depression, cognitive decline

#126
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been any indication that health data and the associated sensitive information are leaving the device without the user's consent? They would run afoul of quite a lot of laws and regulations in all western jurisdictions the moment they do that. AFAIK, except when you enrol in a study, none of that depends on network access.

According to a security researcher[1], a 0-day in Analyticsd allowed any installed app to access the users health data. [1] https://habr.com/en/post/579714/ EDIT: Found the link to the previous HN discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28637276

the health and PII data making its way to log data may give Apple legal cover to ingest the data "accidentally", also.

Recall that Google got to claim their street view cars wardriving was unintentional, and just paid $13M to make it go away, after using the data for about a decade [1]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/tech/google-street-view-priva...

Re: Apple is working on iPhone features to help detect depression, cognitive decline

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UCLA and BioNTech Biogen. BioNTech is still pretty focused on mRNA technology :-)

Thanks. I went to lunch and came back and realized I'd mistyped it, hadn't bothered to put in a correction post and was well passed the edit period by the time I saw it.

For a minute, I got excited that someone was trying to use mRNA against the amyloid hypothesis!

Re: Apple is working on iPhone features to help detect depression, cognitive decline

#128
post #122
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the research finds that any of that data correlates with relevant mental-health conditions, the hope is to turn those signals into an app or feature that could warn people they might be at risk and prompt them to seek care I am worried about the part of article that mentions that they want to automate the analysis of the data to some degree and move it out a strictly clinical research setting. I have also done so…

So, because you’ve done research that’s the end of it? No one else can possibly do better? Game over guys. The guy on hacker news did his best so everyone else should just stop trying. I for one, as a person that swings around with depression, would love something like this on my wrist.

[deleted]

Re: Apple is working on iPhone features to help detect depression, cognitive decline

#129
post #64

I suffer from bi-polar disorder and it's been difficult to get a referral to a psychiatrist who can confirm the diagnosis. The depressive phases are easier to spot and I get medication for that when it's too bad. The thing is, there are already countless mechanisms that can track the obvious symptoms of a manic phase, but none of them have an incentive to tell you that you're suddenly spending too much. Frivolous pur…

Where hours of sleep/night is a reasonable proxy, providers of sleep tracking aren't incentivized to let you spend as much on Amazon as you can. A warning that says something like "hey, you've been getting ~2 hrs of sleep/night with no naps for the past couple days, you might want to consider doing X" would go a long way to helping me manage my symptoms.

Oh, you can actually do that with Shortcuts and Apple Health, today!

Mine has a bug for some reason so I can’t make it, but basically:

1. Get details of health sample, should be one for time asleep 2. Get the number, compare it to the total you want a warning at 3. Display a custom notification if below threshold 4. Set this to run as an automation at like 9 am or whenever, daily, without asking

My only point of doubt is whether you can get this week’s sleep as a health sample.

But you can definitely get last night’s sleep from the health app.

I also checked Autosleep. They have a sleep bank function in shortcuts. You can parse the dictionary output, extract sleep debt and hours sleep, compare both to a set level, and alert if either is beyond threshold.

Autosleep is a great, inexpensive app. Works best with apple watch but can function without.

Shortcuts has gotten extremely powerful in past few years. Anyone on HN with an iphone should check it out. You can automate all kinds of stuff.

Re: Apple is working on iPhone features to help detect depression, cognitive decline

#130

A little dismayed that the sci-fi "tech futurism" attitude of previous decades is now a beaten, lifeless corpse. Opt-in health features that give you more control over your health? World-ending! But 20 years ago, we were imagining a little wristband-type machine that would be able to non-invasively and routinely analyse blood samples, detecting cancer a decade early, increasing human lifespans, etc. This pattern is a…

I would argue that modern TVs and smartphones are some of the most common ways that people are wasting their precious time on earth these days, but do what makes you happy I guess.
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