Apple Health

Tim Cook once said that Apple's greatest contribution to mankind will be in healthcare. It is a bold and exciting statement. If the company is to live up to that promise, the Apple watch will be a key component.

As Discovery has been showing us for the last three decades, taking preventative measures are much more effective than having a reactive cure. The only way to do that is through having data about which preventative measures work and having early warning signs that something could go wrong. Having huge amounts of data will go a long way towards improving healthcare.

Apple is currently working on creating sensors for the Apple watch to read body temperature and monitor blood glucose levels. Taking body temperature is relatively easy and will probably be in the 2022 watch, getting a read on glucose levels without taking a blood sample is much more difficult and is still a few years away.

I'm excited about the knowledge that we will gain from having long term accurate health data on people. At the moment, when scientists want to know cause and effect they send out a survey asking people how often they exercise, how much sleep they get and what they eat. People tend to have a rosy picture in their head when asked these surveys. We can lie to surveys, but Strava and your smartwatch never lie.