Following WWDC 2021 wrapping up last week, Apple executives are continuing to appear in podcasts and YouTube videos to discuss the company’s latest announcements. In a new video posted today, YouTuber Rene Ritchie sits down with Apple’s Kevin Lynch and Deidre Caldbeck to talk Apple Watch, Health, and more.
Ritchie says:
Apple’s Kevin Lynch, VP of Technology, and Deidre Caldbeck, Product Marketing, chat with us about their histories with Apple Watch and Health, new features like ID cards and keys, how they decide on new features, how they made Assistive Touch for Watch, bringing Mobility to iPhone, the visual representation and security of Health information, security vs. sharing, and the future of Apple Health!
During the interview, Lynch spoke in-depth on the new Trends feature in Apple Health, explaining how the company tried to balance showing users useful data without overwhelming them:
Trends is like, how do we draw insights across all kinds of different data types in a simple way. We used a lot of modeling from the studies we’ve been doing to look at patterns and the significance of those patterns for people. We basically have built systems that do statistical relevance for these insights. Not just showing you numbers that may be bigger or smaller, but which ones matter. There’s a lot of thoughtfulness by data type about variances and which types of variances might matter for users.
There was also a lot of work on how many of these trends we might show people. We don’t want to show people too many trends because that’s kind of overwhelming, but also you don’t want to not show any trends. We did a lot of experimenting on tuning that in.
Caldbeck also discusses how Apple’s entire ecosystem can play a role in health monitoring, teasing that the company will continue to invest in new initiatives going forward. Interestingly, this comes as rumors suggest that AirPods Pro will add new fitness tracking and health features next year.
If you think about the health features we have today, there are obviously several in Apple Watch and iPhone. There’s also some health features with AirPods and some of our audio products. So, there’s absolutely an opportunity to leverage the ubiquity of our devices to discover new ways that we can empower people to better manage their health.
We’ll continue to investigate those areas, we’ll continue to invest in those areas. I think with the new features we introduced this year, we are excited to hear from more and more users who are going to take advantage of these great features.
You can find the full video below for more details on Apple Watch, Apple Health, and more.
Lynch also talked with TechCrunch about Apple Health and the future of wearables. Interestingly, the topic of using AirPods for health monitoring also came up here:
I ended our interview by asking Lynch about what kind of possibilities might open up when you consider that AirPods, too, contain their own sensors and gather different data that could complement that monitored by the iPhone and Apple Watch in terms of health.
“We already do sensor fusion across some devices today, and I think there’s all kinds of potential here,” he said.
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