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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

The comments coming in so far are off track.

This is about enabling pretty low key but useful biofeedback things like meditation training and maybe ear temperature for health tracking. The signals that would be available to AirPods are very limited and already pretty well understood. Apple’s achievement (as often) would really be in their industrial technique for producing accurate, efficient, affordable sensors that fit within their exacting product design.

It’s not going to read your mind your zap current across your brain. :)

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doesn't really need to do any of that to have negative effects. Not only are there obvious privacy issues, the 24/7 health monitoring craze of people who are healthy and don't require such interventions is just a waste of money and potentially worry. Yet another avenue to sell people 'health services' that in reality have no measurable impact.

My wife's a physician. She now routinely has to deal with healthy young people who come into her clinic with anxiety because of spurious smart watch alerts concerning their sleep or heart rhythm, despite the fact that they undergo regular checkups to begin with and such monitoring isn't indicated.

I have been using an Apple Watch to track my health as an otherwise healthy person for a while now.

No one has tried to sell me any health services.

I feel far more confident in the security of their Health ecosystem than I do any individual app developer.

This is FUD.

I'm a very unhealthy person. My Apple Watch has been a huge boon for tracking my health.

For some stuff, I'd otherwise be completely oblivious. Self-reporting is notoriously unreliable. Which I've now experienced first hand.

I don’t know, man.

Health isn’t a binary thing, but as a spectrum, I can say that I’m healthier now than I was 10 years ago because I’ve been able to make data-informed insights into my own idiosyncratic body.

Medical research tells you about population patterns and doctors treat illness. Neither of those play the same role as having lots of personal health data to form and test hypotheses over.

Privacy may be a concern, but for now, I’m personally pretty comfortable with Apple’s commitment to privacy as a differentiating factor against their competitors. That won’t last forever, but it’s good for now.

I'm so ready for any and all progress on health monitoring. Use cases like early detection and monitoring of strokes, seizures, Parkinson's, dementia, and so forth.

Per Rosalind Picard, we're just at the very beginning of affective computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_computing

"Yes please" to each and every single thing Picard and others are working on.

https://www.affectiva.com/what/products/

https://imotions.com/products/imotions-lab/modules/fea-facia...

Seizure prediction would get me to purchase and wear an Apple Watch and/or Earbuds all the time.

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