This doesn't mean that Apple won't be successful in healthcare. It's just that the main challenge isn't in creating a nicer product. The challenge is in showing a net positive impact on patient outcomes.
This doesn't mean that Apple won't be successful in healthcare. It's just that the main challenge isn't in creating a nicer product. The challenge is in showing a net positive impact on patient outcomes.
There are also a number of people who die of heart attacks with no symptoms. If Apple can get even 1% of them to the ER that would be a huge win. If the false positive rate is 80% that is still enough real positives that ERs will be get used to telling people "This time it is nothing, but it is good you came in anyway because sometimes this is all the warning you get".
The real worry is false negatives - someone who has chest pain and decides not to go because the watch says all is okay. These people will die when a hospital could save them.
And the vast majority of primary care clinics do have sutures in stock.
The Apple Watch cannot detect heart attacks.
A watch cannot provide more than one lead (and the lead it does provide is really useless for detecting ST elevation, since it's a view across the "top" of the heart, which is not an area that will be involved in the infarction). It is not physically possible to detect a a heart attack from a watch.
If you had asked me six months ago if a watch could detect atrial fibrillation, my answer would have been "sure, why not?". Just because one thing is possible with the advancement of technology, it doesn't mean all things are possible...
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9fkb3t/im_an_emergen...
"Medical grade" is hard to define, but you might actually be very surprised by how accurate this simple sensor could be in an era of deep learning AI.
Earlier this year, there was a paper published at AAAI (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.02511.pdf) that found that just using the sparse, noisy data from the AW sensors (non-continuous, noisy heart rate measurements and a handful of HRV estimates every day), they could diagnose diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea with relatively high accuracy.
In fact, the diabetes diagnoses were comparable in accuracy to cheap lab tests specifically for diabetes. And even more surprisingly, the sleep apnea diagnoses could be made even if one doesn't wear the watch during sleep.
There are other recent papers showing extremely good accuracy in detecting rhythm abnormalities.
Deep learning can often magnify the power of cheap, simple sensors in ways that can in many cases seem unimaginable. Partly because of the power of multi-dimensional inference, and partly because the volume of data you get from wearing a device 24/7 helps to compensate for all the noise and sparsity.
And that was with the current gen AW sensors, which now are a generation behind some other consumer devices -- I'm sure the AW4 catches up (and can likely gather data like continuous HRV). Add in another data point like ECG, even if it's the simplest possible form of ECG, and I wouldn't be surprised if the diagnostic accuracy for many conditions is higher than some lab tests. Especially for transient rhythm abnormalities like transient afib, which might show up late at night after drinking, but not occur during a lab test, which probably makes detecting transient afib hard in a lab until a lot of cardiac changes have occurred.
Commenter /y/AlanYx continues in grandchild:
Yup. Humans also have difficulty thinking and reasoning multi-dimensionally, especially with conditional probabilities across those dimensions. So while the watch probably can't apply the "simplistic fill-in-the-blank style" of reading EKGs taught in the Dubin book that someone recommended above (because the sensors are just too simplistic and the data collected too limited), deep learning can see through the data in ways people often can't.
There's a good example of this in the DeepHeart paper I linked to -- the authors mention that no diagnostically predictive relationship between heart rate patterns during waking hours and sleep apnea was known prior to the work, likely because it is too complex to spot by just looking at heart rate graphs in the way humans do. (And in fact because a convolutional neural network is used, it's not easy right now to tease out in an explainable way to humans exactly what the computer is "seeing", although its specificity and sensitivity characteristics are known.)
A heart attack is a very acute condition, and doesn't give you the same luxury of looking at things over time. You have to get it right, and you only have one shot at it. When looking at chronic conditions you can built up a confidence over time, and only raise the alert when you're very sure. With a heart attack, you have a window of minutes, to an hour or two. False positives are much more of a risk in that case, and the cost of false positives is magnified significantly when a screening tool is widespread.
I may be mistaken, but you seem to be extrapolating my comment to mean that I don't think we will see continued expansion of screening tools built into various wearables. That's not true at all. I think it's quite obvious that this is an area where we will see significant growth over the coming decade.
That doesn't change my stance that heart attacks are categorically different, and much harder to detect from a sensor isolated on the wrist. I think the most promising path to doing that is detecting elevated troponin levels in the blood, and while there is some work being done on accomplishing that noninvasively, it's still a long way from being readily available.
I'm not saying there is, I just wonder if heart attacks might cause some discernible but very complex pattern visible in high-dimensional data that we haven't discovered yet, or if there is just too much physical distance between the wrist and heart to drown out all signal.
False positives are not harmless http://theconversation.com/routine-mammograms-do-not-save-li...
Apple is a big rich company, but I imagine their lawyers wanted to make sure they were REALLY sure they weren’t about to screw themselves over with tens of thousands of lawsuits, above and beyond the FDA requirements.
It certainly not designed to replace a REAL device at a doctors office/hospital for diagnostic purposes.
Apple Watch isn’t really any different here, except potentially in scale. While that does mean potential impact is large, there is no a priori reason to assume apple has got it wrong; it’s not that difficult to find the right people for this sort of project.
It would be very interesting to see an ROC curve ...
I'm not saying that the healthcare features in the new Apple Watch are bad; just that it will be interesting to see what their net contribution to healthcare will be.
I totally understand the caution medical boards use when crafting their recommendations. However, I don't think consumer access to medical screening equipment is similar. In fact, I think that empowering consumers and patients to be more in control of their medical decisions is vastly net-positive, and as the article points out, the healthcare industry is going to need to adapt to it.
Do mammograms detect cancer? Yes.
Do mammograms lead to reductions in all cause mortality? Probably not, no.
There's a bunch of stuff where we use proxy measures when we should be using different measures (all cause mortality; days lost to disability; QALYs).
> However, I don't think consumer access to medical screening equipment is similar. In fact, I think that empowering consumers and patients to be more in control of their medical decisions is vastly net-positive, and as the article points out, the healthcare industry is going to need to adapt to it.
You get a scan. It shows a lump. What do you do? Most people say "get a biopsy", which is ok if we're saving lives or reducing days lost to disability, but if we're not doing those and we're causing harm then giving power to people really just means hurting them.
Here's a nice infographic: https://twitter.com/Jia_Luo/status/951985691772293120
18 deaths vs 21 deaths, and that's important, but look at the extra harm caused.
False positives will always cause undue distress, and that's a factor worth considering, but the consequences of a false positive from a mammogram or PSA test could be an invasive biopsy, as you point out, or even unnecessary treatment. Wouldn't the consequences of a false positive AF detection typically be much less serious though, such as some additional non-invasive tests? There's a financial and psychological cost to that, but is it really comparable to a false positive indication for cancer, which would be much more difficult to follow up, especially weighed against the benefits of detecting undiagnosed conditions?
When I saw the product launch I shared your concerns about emergency services being inundated with calls from watches detecting falls, but apparently the chief executive of the US National Emergency Number Association isn't concerned. He said this about it:
“These are the real beginnings of exciting innovation. I don’t see, at least initially, an overwhelming number of false positives coming in. But only time will tell.”
This happened to me just a few months ago. I'm sitting in the passenger's seat of a car and, out of the blue, I get a call from a weird Caller ID which, of course, I hang up on. I get another call, this time from a regular looking number in the local area code. I reluctantly answer it (in spite of my friend driving telling me to hang up) and it's nearby emergency services. I'm of course totally confused and ended up hanging up on them when they start asking my name etc.
It turns out there's a setting you can change to make this harder to do by accident but I had no idea until I looked it up.
Having said that, I love the direction Apple is taking with this product. Smart watches have been on the market for quite a number of years now but they're pretty much restricted to being gimmicky devices only as most people don't find it very useful or have a real need for it. If Apple could achieve the breakthrough in blood glucose monitoring feature then I strongly believe we will see mass adoption in very near future.
Because they fill that lock screen with junk making it a butt dial magnet.
This is no longer the case.