How Apple Watch Unexpectedly Measured My Vitals During a Car Crash | Hacker News Reader

How Apple Watch Unexpectedly Measured My Vitals During a Car Crash

razorianfly.com

22 pointsgregcohn18 comments

The thing I found most surprising about this article was during the accident and subsequent setting in on shock, the authors heart rate didn't really increase by that much. I would have expected the heart rate to hit much higher numbers, the shock of being in an accident and the rush of adrenaline kicking in (causing the heart to beat faster). Glad to read that everyone was okay though. I am interested in knowing why the other car swerved in the first place? Was it an accident or were they distracted? The kind of metrics Apple Watch will never be able to tell us.

Interesting to think that first responders may someday be able to check a person's "black box" to be able to assess certain aspects of their condition.

I don't think "assess" is the word you meant to write haha.

as·sess əˈses/Submit verb evaluate or estimate the nature, ability, or quality of.

Not a technically rich article, but interesting conceptually to think about the kinds of data that are going to be routinely captured, uploaded, processed, and aggregated.

My knee-jerk reaction was to think of the privacy implications, but then I realized that most people will jump at the chance to upload their minute-to-minute health status to the cloud.

This is why I'm so disappointed that I haven't seen any of these devices let you log to your own servers.

I'm not saying make it easy, I can hijack a DNS entry and host a server pretending to be you, just open the protocol and let me host the darn server myself.

The give-away to their goals, is that these devices you buy are one-time purchases that rely on cloud services. Who's paying for the servers your device is uploading to, and how are they coming up with that money now that they have this wealth of health data on you and millions of other people. I have nightmares about what most business people would do in that situation, and it's why I stopped using my device.

> I can hijack a DNS entry and host a server pretending to be you

Not for long.[1]

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/04/30/deprecating-non...

The solution to this is very simple: cut off their access entirely.

I use an SSL proxy at home and if you attempt to pin certificates such that the local certificate store is ignored or inaccessible. Your device can be guaranteed to not have access from my network. End of story.

I don't think these watches use a browser to reach their servers (i.e. the cloud).

Once it's the norm for browsers it wouldn't make much sense not to use HTTPS everywhere.

exactly. at some point in the future, deaths are going to be regularly recorded in consumer biometrics, for example.

I would imagine plenty of fatal car crashes have been recorded in the data sent to google about traffic. Data points with incredible reduction in speed and then no further data.

If he was using an Android device he would be inundated with calls about the, "recent accident that wasn't your fault"...

Similar thing for me with my bike crash in 2012 - speed drops to zero, heart rate spikes, then drops whilst I sit around dazed.

https://www.strava.com/activities/22929472/analysis/17804/18...

It's a pity that the only way to get your own data out of the health app is via (to me, quite inaccessible) XML files.

Does anyone have a guide, or any guidance to working with them?

I don't have any experience in using Excel for XML data myself, but it seems that these articles might help you import the data into Excel:

https://support.office.com/en-au/article/Map-XML-elements-to...

https://support.office.com/en-au/article/Import-XML-data-6ec...

This is highly suspicious IMO. You almost died in a car crash with your family, yet two days later you wrote how glad you were that you can see a graph of your heart rate? Come on...

On the other hand, I could be wrong though, it's just my opinion.

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