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The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

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Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a legal structure in place that would prevent a new owner from rewriting the privacy policy and doing whatever the hell they wanted?

I'm not a lawyer. In high school I took a class that covered some aspects of contract law. Want my speculation? I do know something about the financial incentives, though. Fitbit's users are its customers. Insurers and employers are a small part of revenue. The people Fitbit needs to keep happy are users.

No need to speculate. Of course it would be reassuring if there was something in the privacy policy that directly addressed the question.

There is stuff like If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we will continue to take measures to protect the confidentiality of personal information and give affected users notice before transferring any personal information to a new entity.

But "measures" and "notice" are pretty weak sauce if they can result in the new entity still doing whatever it wants with the data. How about an explicit opt in policy that would actually impact the sale value of the data?

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#112
post #73

The only downside to the Apple Watch in my book is the short battery life which should theoretically make it impractical for sleep tracking. I was recently stupefied to discover Nokia Steel [1] and how virtually unknown it is to the general public, my former self included. It comes with great design, no bullshit digital screen, the usual tracking features, and most importantly seems like it's a return to form for Nok…

This perception of low battery life has really lasted from the first apple watch. It was the reason, along with that it wasn't water proof enough for me, that I didn't get the first one.

I wear my apple watch 2 all day, sleep in it, and charge it in the time I'm getting ready in the morning. that's all it needs and it never runs out of battery.

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#113
post #73

The only downside to the Apple Watch in my book is the short battery life which should theoretically make it impractical for sleep tracking. I was recently stupefied to discover Nokia Steel [1] and how virtually unknown it is to the general public, my former self included. It comes with great design, no bullshit digital screen, the usual tracking features, and most importantly seems like it's a return to form for Nok…

The other impediment to sleep tracking with Apple Watch is its heart rate measurements. One can get acceptable sleep tracking just from accelerometer data, but to get something like Fitbit's sleep tracking you need to measure heart-rate variability. Apple Watch's intermittent heart rate measurements (outside of workout mode) might make certain health metrics difficult to gather without killing the battery.

Theoretically Apple could catch up with Fitbit in this area at some point and achieve continuous 24-hour heart rate measurements.

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I work from home I have a standing desk, and it looks like the watch does not pick me as standing, so I almost never reach the standing goal there

This happened to me an hour ago. I stood up at my desk and continued working but it didn't count according to the watch. I'd speculate that it wants some lateral movement as well - stand up and get a drink of water, maybe?

It wants you to repeat the process of standing. So, if you stand for an hour, that is only 1 stand procedure. You have to sit for 5 minutes, then stand again.

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#115
post #99
post #73

The only downside to the Apple Watch in my book is the short battery life which should theoretically make it impractical for sleep tracking. I was recently stupefied to discover Nokia Steel [1] and how virtually unknown it is to the general public, my former self included. It comes with great design, no bullshit digital screen, the usual tracking features, and most importantly seems like it's a return to form for Nok…

I recently got an Apple Watch series 3 (non-cellular) and I can use it for three days before needing to charge it. It’s my understanding that this wasn’t the case with the previous versions, the series 3 battey life has been drastically improved.

My series 2 lasts two days. It'd be nice if it lasted three so I wouldn't have to take my charger with me on weekends away, but I haven't found it to be much of a pain either.

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#116
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not so bad. They can follow up and figure it out. Some people will go for decades before getting a proper diagnostic - or even die before they get one.

Unfortunately, most arrhythmias are benign and do not lead to further treatment from a physician. So you are taking 300,000 worried people wrongly to a general practitioner, who in fact can do nothing but write down the event and perhaps correlate it with other data.

It's worth always keeping this in mind, and not just taking extra worried people to the gp, but also giving unwarranted peace of mind to those who have a problem.

Even just having them get in a car and go to their GP, or increase their stress levels, have the potential to cause harm. It may be an exceedingly low risk, but applied to a large enough number of people and it starts adding up. When applied to conditions that not everyone has, this can easily tilt the balance.

Consider a hypothetical condition and a population of 1000000. If 1% has the condition at any one time, and the accuracy of the test is 97%, then 10,000 should have the condition. Of those we'd expect 9,700 to get the correct diagnosis; 300 would remain undiagnosed; But 3% of those who don't have the condition - an additional 29,700 - will be wrongly diagnosed.

Let's say this is a condition where 10% would die untreated without this new intervention, it'd be tempting to suggest we've saved 970 people. But early detection might not make that much of a difference - for many things the most severe cases will be noticed anyway and/or late detection is still sufficient to save the patient.

Let's assume for this hypothetical condition, earlier detection will save 10% more of those. In the above that'd save 97 people. Awesome. But lets say it causes 10% more of the undiagnosed ones to die because they wait longer. That's 3 more dead. So net 94?

But if only 0.33% of those wrongfully diagnosed end up dying as the result of the misdiagnosis, be it car crashes on the way to the GP, or the visit leading to a follow up error leading to an intervention that is generally but not always safe, then the wrongful diagnosis would kill 98 people.

I'm not saying that would be the case here. But it's an illustration of why it is important to consider not how many problems are detected, but what benefits early detection gives vs. the cost of wrongly diagnosing people, even when it seems benign enough (just another test, and they'll confirm it was a mistake?)

E.g. there's been pushback against large scale breast cancer screening for this very reason: They're very successful at finding cancer early, but most gets found eventually anyway, and the improvement in long term survival rates from the earlier detection is reasonably small.

Couple this with low overall rates of occurrence across the total population at any given point in time (cancer rates look high when considering "will X get cancer at some point in their life?", but most people will be free of cancer at any given single point in their life; even most people who have had cancer), and the impact of false positives and potential health implications of a (very small but still existent) risk involved in even something "simple" like a biopsy, and it's unclear if large scale screening is ethical (over general populations; screening of groups with sufficiently high risk factors is another matter entirely).

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#117
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is not so bad. They can follow up and figure it out. Following up is not free. So that's cost incurred for the ones who have no problem in the first place.

Think about the cost of not following up. Personal health, productivity, life quality. Also here in the Netherlands we have healthcare. I'd rather see these emerging devices offer good warnings to go see a doctor then people not going at all or going to often for every little thing that they feel and googled on the internet because they are to unsure.

See my long response elsewhere. Depending on incidence rates and whether or not the effect of following up earlier is sufficiently large, there can - and sometimes is - a net detrimental effect to wrongfully diagnosing someone with a condition. Even when following up is relatively simple and risk free, and lives are saved by finding conditions early.

E.g. cause an extra million doctors visits due to wrongly diagnosing people, and the incident rate of e.g. extra infections transmitted from another patient, or compounded misdiagnosis leading to extra interventions which have some risk of failure, or even just accidents on the way to the doctors office, very quickly leads to extra harm just from the sheer volume.

That extra harm might be worth it, if the early diagnosis of others save enough lives - the same way seat belts kills some people but save far more. But it also might not, e.g. if the condition is rare enough, or early detection have little enough effect in improving outcomes.

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#118
post #73

The only downside to the Apple Watch in my book is the short battery life which should theoretically make it impractical for sleep tracking. I was recently stupefied to discover Nokia Steel [1] and how virtually unknown it is to the general public, my former self included. It comes with great design, no bullshit digital screen, the usual tracking features, and most importantly seems like it's a return to form for Nok…

I believe these watches used to be known under the Withings brand which got bought by Nokia. Very nice design (Max Bill inspired I guess).

Yeah I was going to say, that design looked really familiar.

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#119
post #66

As someone with diagnosed apnea I have so many doubts about this. Machines to diagnose apnea have lots of sensors including electrodes, "chest-band" pulsometers, and "saturationmeters". I have asked doctors about capabilities of smart devices for apnea control or detection, all I got was laughs. Sorry but I think this is not true. Go and see your doctor.

Nobody is saying to use this to replace going to the doctors. It's for you to just download the app, try it for a night, and see the doctor if the result concern you. It doesn't have to be hundreds percent accurate. Are you against teaching people to do self check-up of breast cancer, too? Because I'm sure medical process of checking for breast cancer requires more complicate tools than just feeling your breast with…

I'm against breast self exams, and so is the US Preventive Services Task Force. The evidence indicates there's no benefit but instead the practice calls harm (in anxiety, overdiagnosis, unneeded biopsies, etc.

https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Document/...

Re: The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea, a new study suggests

#120
post #110
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there is a huge difference in the capabilities of the Apple Watch and the Nokia Steel. The Steel has a motion sensor, accelerometer, bluetooth and maybe wifi? The Apple Watch, needless to say, has a lot more than that: GPS, GSM, wifi, bluetooth, heart rate sensor, accelerometer, light sensor, etc. I'm sure the Nokia Steel fills a niche but I feel like the Apple Watch is much more interesting from a capabi…

And if the Apple watch also came with a fold-out bottle opener and a tool for getting stones out of horse's hooves, would that make it a better watch? It's not about the number of "features", but whether it's a productive, convenient item to have in your life. A 1-day battery life on a watch is a serious flaw. The only smartwatch that was ever a good watch , at least that I've seen, was the Pebble. The one-week batte…

> It's not about the number of "features", but whether it's a productive, convenient item to have in your life. A 1-day battery life on a watch is a serious flaw.

And the Apple watch is a productive and convenient item to have in many people's lives. I have a series 2 and easily get 2 days of battery life. Apparently the series 3s can get 3 days.

For me at least, 1 week battery life is in some ways worse. It means that I will not charge it regularly, and it will likely die when I want to use it. Right now I never think about the battery on my Apple Watch, and just charge it when taking a shower in the morning.

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