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Comment by shasheene | Hacker News Reader

Wearable health monitors are really the future.

It's a marketer's dream: arrhythmia causes young healthy people sometimes suddenly drop dead without any prior symptoms. It happened to Sheryl Sandberg's husband. Sudden cardiac death kills 600,000 people per year with 50% having no prior cardiac disease. [1]

Hopefully the Apple Heart Study turns out to allow early detection of arrhythmia. Apple will end up selling millions of watches based on people's (myself included) mildly irrational fears.

[1] ttp://www.clevelandclinicmeded.com/medicalpubs/diseasemanagement/cardiology/cardiac-arrhythmias/

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The thing with sudden cardiac death and arrhythmias is that the first sign/symptom is often sudden cardiac death, so unless you have a defib linked into it it isn’t going to actually stop your sudden cardiac death.

My comment history is negative on these types of sensors, I still feel they are gimmicky. For example this chip talks about capacity to measure blood pressure variability but there is no way to measure blood pressure without a cuff (or invasive monitoring) so I’m still trying to imagine the ‘all in one’ fitness device this is meant for

No, Apple won't, at least not until I can use their watch without having to own the rest of their suite of products.

Fitbit, on the other hand, has no choice but to adapt to survive. They may not be the leading edge, but they'll sell more units than Apple.

> Fitbit, on the other hand, has no choice but to adapt to survive. They may not be the leading edge, but they'll sell more units than Apple.

This presupposes that Fitbit will survive, which is not at all a given. The much more likely possibility is that they just go out of business, which is the usual fate of single-device companies when Apple enters their market (Nokia, Pebble, etc.)

I'm curious when you expect Fitbit's turnaround to occur. The market sure doesn't seem to like their odds against the Apple Watch: https://imgur.com/a/LeEa6

Fitbit should survive so long as there are people like myself who prefer mechanical watches. And with vintage watches having a renaissance in the last few years the number of people going mechanical could increase.

And so there is a market for health devices that are single purpose just focusing on health. Problem of course is they are susceptible to cheap, Chinese based entrants.

Fitbit is actually worse than Apple.

On iOS all health data should be stored in HealthKit. It's open, secure and allows for data exchange between applications. Every other app I use works with it except Fitbit which sees health data as their asset rather than something belonging to the users.

If Fitbit wanted to prevent users from storing their data in HealthKit, wouldn't it forbid 3rd party apps that do it, like Sync Solver and Power Sync, from using the API?

You can't get all data via the API, it's severely limited.

I went for a Garmin instead.

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