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Comment by KukiAirani | Hacker News Reader

To me this is an incredible milestone. Biometric feedback for health is a simple but effective way to extend lifespans and make people happier.

A couple things I predict are coming in the not too distant future:

- Continuous feedback and monitoring of blood nutrition and glucose levels.

- Continuous feedback of mood - A real life mood ring, if you will.

- Mood data being correlated with your real life activity, guiding you towards things that make you genuinely happy and away from "empty calories" (Like mindlessly scrolling).

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Amazon’s creepy Halo wearable has what I think is constant mood detection through examination of your voice and machine learning. Search for Tone here: https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

Oh wow. Fascinating. These things always seem incredibly rosy in theory, but immediately take on dark undertones when you realize it's the big bad tech companies (/s - kind of) actually building it. I'll definitely check it out though, thanks for sharing.

> These things always seem incredibly rosy in theory,

No, just dark in the beginning, the middle, and the end.

> Continuous feedback of mood

That's very black mirror.

Also, didn't facebook get busted basically manipulating feeds to see how they affect people emotionally?

Busted has a few meanings. They were caught, yes, but faced no apparent penalty, either legal or user backlash.

Yeah these ideas always sound great in theory, but the privacy issues are immense. Apple however does seem like a company fully committed to privacy. Of course this is much easier for them as their business model is selling hardware and doesn't rely on selling your data to advertisers at all.

> Apple however does seem like a company fully committed to privacy.

Trust but verify

I never understood why those in the tech industry were upset about that.

They were doing A/B tests and were tracking sentiment. So what? How is that different than running an A/B test and tracking any other dimension?

People were asking questions like "how many people died because facebook was manipulating their emotions?". What? Why can't we say that about any change ever? It seemed to only matter to people when they started looking at sentiment.

Think about it, they did experiments knowing negative sentiments like anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, despair were likely potential outcomes. They were so prepared for those negative outcomes to occur that they went out of their way to measure it. They did these experiments against thousands (millions?) of users.

Those outcomes are likely on any A/B test. Just because you don't measure it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Except they induced the experiment. If your A/B test might negatively affect millions of people, and the only upside is your quarterly bonus, maybe it is immoral to be running those tests.

is any AB test ethical if done with unwilling partecipants?

I agree, but probably not for the reason you think. All A/B tests on users are a form of psychological experiment and should require explicit consent, like an ethical psychological experiment would. It’s concerning that the software industry gets away with this unethical practice until the experiment explicitly mentions mood or sentiment, instead of implicitly being used to change user behaviour.

That's at least a principled stance, which I can appreciate.

I still disagree, though. It seems like the only logical way to get out of your thought process would be to create software and then never update or change anything. Either that or have every user sign a waiver saying that the product could change in the future and that might impact them psychologically.

After all, why is it different when you're making a change without A/B testing it? Surely every change has some hypothesis attached to it. Does it only matter to you when developers observe the metrics changing?

you could make a study with willing partecipants

> I still disagree, though. It seems like the only logical way to get out of your thought process would be to create software and then never update or change anything. Either that or have every user sign a waiver saying that the product could change in the future and that might impact them psychologically.

This is a false choice. There are multiple ways you can ethically approach improving software, such as:

- user interviews

- A/B testing with informed consent

- user testing (directly observing the user while they use the software)

- focus groups

- feedback forms

- crash/error logging

There are probably more, but the theme among all of them is user consent. The ethical implications of using engagement metrics to drive software development is well-worn territory at this point, especially with respect to social media, and I don’t understand why the software industry seems to get a pass when others don’t.

what if any A/B testing is actually similarly as bad? Users didn't sign up to be your test subject...

Maybe we should do studies where subjects are consenting to it...

Is that different to you than, for example, releasing a change to a product to everyone and observing the change in metrics?

if that change is the same to every user, then I would start my argument from the position that it is, in fact, different;

if the user can tell that something changes because of a new features/changelog that explains it (or lists it for more trivial changes), again, seems different.

I would be open to discussion on how it's the same, or how it's unethical, though

High-level feedback has already been invented, it’s called The News and most people are not helped by it.

I could use some feedback about my sleep. Other than that though it sounds like a real nag.

There is an axis of high-level to low-level feedback in the sense of society (news) to individual (sleep).

And there is another axis of high to low feedback in the sense of abstract (happiness) to concrete (heartrate).

I believe you might be conflating these two axes, but you made me think about it and I think it's very interesting to consider.

- Continuous feedback and monitoring of blood nutrition and glucose levels.

Is this currently possible without drawing blood? I know little about stuff in this area, but it does seem super useful if a watch was able to do stuff like this especially.

Possibly with an implant?

Continuous glucose monitoring doesn't require a blood draw, but it isn't in a form that would work in a watch to my knowledge.

I expect that Apple and others are heavily invested in cracking glucose monitoring on a watch like this. That unlocks a lot of possibilities for diabetics and non-diabetics alike.

Levels is probably the closest thing to this right now: https://www.levelshealth.com/ - There are other continuous glucose monitors, but the "smart" integrations with fitness tracking, etc. seem novel to me.

Freestyle Libre is a device you attach and replace every seven days. It can be read by a hand held patients get but there are apps for some features. Even it can be off and living with one you get used to where its going to be relative your actual level.

So I doubt they will get far from that any time soon. The first company that can do it without puncturing the skin is going to have one helluva a market. How that is done, if that can be done, is still to be seen. Perhaps there is some other measurement not yet considered which can offer numbers.

Verily (Google) tried contact lenses, but couldn't get it to work: https://blog.verily.com/2018/11/update-on-our-smart-lens-pro...

There are teams/companies working on this and I believe the sensor patches are available, not aware of anyone making a wearable computer out of it (yet):

https://sciencebeta.com/transdermal-glucose-measurement-patc...

> Biometric feedback for health is a simple but effective way to extend lifespans and make people happier.

There's a current TikTok meme which approximates to: people linking Wii Fit calling them obese on a daily basis to their disordered eating and disordered relationship with exercise.

It's not sure that notifying people that they have low cardio health will have any meaningful benefit to them.

It really depends on the individual. Some people are highly motivated by a hard dose of reality. Others just get discouraged. I suspect that difference is due to having an internal versus external locus of control.

I am with you on glucose.

I think real-time continuous blood oxygen would be another one.

Interesting, I hadn't thought about this one. I just looked it up and didn't realize that they already have an app for blood oxygen, though it isn't continuous: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211027

Garmin smart watches have had continuous blood oxygen monitoring for some time now. But measuring at the wrist can never be as accurate as fingertip.

Take their readings with a serious grain of salt. Even with the admonition "not as accurate as fingertip". Their readings are garbage. A random number generator does a better job of reading my SpO2. And I'm particularly pale. It's even worse on people with dark skin.

I see absolutely no benefit in the pulox feature on my garmin watch.

Mine usually reads about 97%, which is probably close to right. But I haven't been able to test it at high altitude yet.

I would love to see constant hydration level monitoring.

That has been tried. So far it doesn't work. https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/11/lvls-hydration-sensor-ri...

Nevertheless, it would be a good goal. Hydration is critical in so many health and medical concerns.

Wait, how does it measure genuine happiness?

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