I read that this focus is particularly driven by Tim Cook's fascination with the space. It sort of confirms my idea of him as not a very image conscious CEO, especially in contrast with Jobs who was a legend at imbuing Apple with coolness and desirability.
I agree if it's poorly implemented or marketed it won't be adopted, but Apple probably has a shot at getting it right.
There is also the segment that just wants to lose weight, and that can apply at all ages. A continuous glucose monitor is also a great way to monitor keto diets or similar. Keep yourself under a certain glucose level continuously and your body will be forced to use fat sources!
1. Regulation: it is very hard to innovate at the pace of the consumer-electronics industry while satisfying FDA regulations.
2. For general purpose applications, signals and measurements are highly noisy and sensors are still deeply in the academic realm, working only in very special use-cases, as opposed to 'in the wild'. It is a different matter for special applications such as Type-I diabetes or other diseases because devices are critically important and patients are willing to tolerate discomfort (of wearing probes, pumps, etc.)
3. In general, predictive power of algorithms tends to be lower for non-genomic health care applications because of variability across individuals, errors in installing devices, rarity of certain types of data for training and validation, etc.
4. Some of the key benefits are hard to grasp for users because of the slow time scales over which things like weight loss occur, and also due to the multi-factorial/multi-component nature of human well-being.
On the contrary, going into health will reinforce the brand, not dilute it. Apple has always been an aspirational lifestyle brand. Given the growing scope of computing in our lives - work, social, leisure, health - the lifestyle that Apple sells is only going to get more complete and compelling.
There's also a growing trend of QS and tracking health data points, and increasingly not just among geeks. You can see it in the nutrition space as well, where people are optimizing food, getting bloodwork, etc. These fields are ascendant and glucose tracking matters there too.
If the idea is to cater to the shifting age if it's fanboys it may be a great play. The young generation moves from obsession with Emojis and Instagram to having diabetes and heart disease pretty quick. Why not cater to the shift when you already have the customer. 3M isn't making glucose testing sexy like only Apple can.
Google, Apple and Samsung have been vie for these feature in 2014.
It is not uncommon to focus on health space when the technology is mature, we can't live and worry about our health.
What is the point if you have the greatest smartphone watch and still lead unhealthy lifestyle?
Hostpitals has been participating in health research because they want to make these accessible for you 24 hours.
If Apple doesn't make decent laptops and desktops then who else can?
This is what bothers be about Tim Cooks priorities in health and celebrities next to his apathy towards computers. (I don't consider the iPad a computer I consider it a device)
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at [the] D8 conference in 2010. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”
Maybe it's time for a new "truck" company that focuses on the needs of the few and Apple can ditch computers and focus on the needs of the many.
And personally, I don't think it's all that weird. I think it fits perfectly with branding, but maybe I'm less aware of it.