Apple Health

Fast Company reports that Apple has acquired Gliimpse, a health startup whose stated aim is to allow any American to pull together a comprehensive picture of their health, which they would be free to share with medical professionals as desired.

Our vision is personalized and shareable medical records for all 317,000,000 Americans.

The acquisition reportedly happened ‘earlier this year.’ While it hasn’t yet been noted on the Gliimpse website, Apple has issued its usual ‘non-denial’ statement that it ‘buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.’

Founder Anil Sethi started out as an Apple engineer back in the late 80s, before becoming a serial entrepreneur after forming and taking public his company Sequoia Software. He said that he formed Gliimpse out of a frustration at the incompatibility of existing Electronic Health Record systems …

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Patently Apple reports that Apple has applied for a patent related to a wearable electrocardiographic (ECG) device that could take the form of a watch, ring, brooch or similar.

A wearable device can be affixed to a limb of the human body such as a wrist or ankle, as an example. The wearable device can be worn on the left or right wrist, or even on the right or left ankle.

The reason the patent application emphasizes use on either left or right side of the body is that the patent focuses on an issue that can arise when taking readings from only one side of the body …

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A rather vague Chinese report claims that Apple is working on a new ‘killer device’ in the health field, due to be released next year. The somewhat hyperbolic piece in the Economic Daily News also claims that new health-sensing tech will be built into the 2017 iPhone …

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The latest connected gadget to go on sale in Apple Stores is the Withings Body Cardio, a scale that measures not just weight and body fat, but can also detect cardiovascular problems. Using sensors that measure Pulse Wave Velocity – how quickly blood pumps through your arteries – it can point to problems like hypertension and high cholesterol.

Body Cardio gives everyone the opportunity to follow heart health at home via the introduction of a new measurement: pulse wave velocity. Recognized by the medical community as the best stand-alone indicator to provide a reliable assessment of overall cardiovascular health, pulse wave velocity assessments from Body Cardio have the potential to revolutionize how we care for our cardiovascular health.

The scale can’t identify the reason for poor PWV readings, but the connected iPhone app will let you know if it is in the range where you should arrange a medical check-up …

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You might have thought that the health & fitness labs Apple created to help develop the Apple Watch might have been closed once the product had launched, but a piece in Time reports that they are still operating 12 hours a day, six days a week.

I was recently able to visit one of Apple’s labs dedicated to sports and health. For 12 hours a day, six days a week, Apple brings in Apple employees of every shape, condition and ethnicity to do various exercises and monitor them with the most sophisticated medical systems available. Apple has seven full-time nurses in the facility I visited, using medical monitoring equipment that can determine all types of heath related data points.

ABC gave us a look inside one of the labs in the run-up to the launch of the Watch last year, when we learned that they include climate chambers which allow the company to simulate a wide range of different environments, but this latest report does include a new claim …

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According to a report from Fortune and her LinkedIn profile, Apple has recently hired former Nest executive and co-founder of Google X Yoky Matsuoka. At Nest, Matsuoka was the head of technology. According to the report, Matsuoka is joining Apple to help with its health initiatives, including ResearchKit, HealthKit, and CareKit. Matsuoka will report to chief operating officer Jeff Williams who oversees all of the company’s health projects.

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Prior to the official announcement of the Apple Watch, there were multiple rumors that the device would be packed with health-related sensors. When it finally launched, however, it got just a heart-rate monitor – albeit a sophisticated one. A teardown revealed that there’s also a pulse oximeter in there, to measure oxygen saturation in your blood, but Apple hasn’t yet activated that functionality.

The apparent turnabout on sensors was explained by Tim Cook, who last year told the Telegraph that Apple wanted to avoid the need for FDA approval as a regulated health product as that would slow innovation. Any additional sensors, he strongly hinted, would be external.

If you don’t want to wait that long, however, health-tech company Azoi has launched the Kito+, a credit-card sized unit that pairs with an iPhone app to measure heart-rate, ECG, blood oxygen, respiration rate and skin temperature. Costing £99 ($145), you can either use it as a standalone unit, or slot it into the supplied iPhone case for the iPhone 6/6s/Plus …

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I’ve always been intrigued about the idea of a standing desk, but I’ve never been motivated to actually try one until recently. As someone who sits at a desk and blogs about Mac and iOS for a living, I was particularly interested in seeing what type of benefits such a desk could offer.

Enter the PowerUp from UpDesk, a Nashville-based company that specializes in standing desks. The PowerUp, as its name alludes to, is a motorized standing desk that can lower and raise with the press of a button.

I’ve been testing out the PowerUp for the last few weeks, and have collected some thoughts and observations about the setup. Does it really make a difference in my day to day Mac and iOS blogging workflow?
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A patent application describes how the Apple Watch and iPhone could work together to detect medical emergencies like a heart attack, and automatically call 911.

While the patent wording doesn’t specifically name either the Apple Watch or iPhone, the meaning of one electronic device cooperating with another one seems pretty clear.

An occurrence of one or more “care events” is detected by an electronic device monitoring environmental data and/or user data from one or more sensors. The electronic device transmits one or more alerts regarding the detected occurrence to at least one other electronic device. In some cases, the electronic device may cooperate with at least one other electronic device in monitoring, detecting, and/or transmitting.

Apple says that the setup could detect a range of emergencies, and take appropriate action depending on the severity – ranging from sending an email to a family member at the low end to calling 911 in the most urgent of cases …

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For anyone looking to get better tracking and a bird’s eye view of your sleep habits, be sure to check out Sleep++ 2.0 available today. This latest version brings in a major sleep analysis algorithm overhaul to help users get a better understanding of nightly sleep patterns.

For users who frequently forget to stop their sleep tracking, the app’s update also introduces the ability to trim time off any extra hours accidentally accrued.

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Apple Watch competitor Pebble has today announced a hefty update to its smartwatch experience. The update, which bumps the company’s Pebble Time smartphone app for iPhone to version 3.6 and the watch firmware to version 3.9, includes a variety of enhancements to Health, Messages, and more.

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When news came out that Apple was working on a dedicated Health dashboard app, which would offer a way to take healthcare monitoring mobile, I was extremely excited. I had been recently diagnosed with traumatic arthritis in my knees and I needed a better all-in-one system to track my steps, weight, and BMI. None of the other apps on the market at the time seemed to do any one of those three especially well. Apple’s Health app has since become my go-to app for everything I wanted to log and more. It’s not perfect, but it’s a built-in dashboard with tie-ins to plenty of iOS apps.

Within a few weeks of using Health, I soon realized I wanted a better way to automate inputting data into the system. I eventually came to a methodology that worked great for me and decided it was time to share three of the different ways you can automate quickly logging your weight into the Health app.

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This week’s iOS 9.3 beta software update for iPhone and iPad is a pretty major release for a mid-cycle version. New features including the F.lux-like Night Shift which lets you change the color temperature of your display and Touch ID plus secure passwords for Notes feel more major version features. Other parts like new 3D Touch quick actions for many of Apple’s stock apps feel more like playing catch up, but overall iOS 9.3 is shaping up to be an impressive release. Check out the details below:

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Biometric specialist Valencell – whose technology is licensed by iRiver, LG, Sony and others – has filed a lawsuit accusing Apple of using underhand tactics to gain access to its patented technology for use in the Apple Watch.

The company claims that Apple violated three of its patents for improving the accuracy and reliability of heart-rate data when using the photoplethysmography (PPG) approach used in the Apple Watch. But the lawsuit alleges more than just patent infringement, reports AI: it also claims that Apple used deceptive techniques to get access to the technology …

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iPhones have already been used for an impressive number of medical applications. We’ve seen them used to screen for skin cancer, manage diabetes, prevent blindness, provide eye examinations and diagnose everything from sleep apnea to bipolar episodes. But the next step could be a $250 organic chemistry lab we can carry in our pocket.

The WSJ has been talking to a couple of startups working in this field, including 6SensorLabs which has a device that can – with the help of a smartphone – detect whether a food really is gluten-free.

The Nima from 6SensorLabs is an organic-chemistry lab small enough to carry in your pocket. Right now it is only good for one thing: detecting gluten in foods at minuscule concentrations, as little as 20 parts per million, the FDA’s threshold for declaring a food “gluten-free.”

The company says that this could be just the start, with future versions able to detect the bacteria that cause food poisoning …

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The iPhone is an amazing device. It fits in a pocket, yet it’s an incredibly powerful computer that connects us to the world, entertains us wherever we go, and captures quality photos and videos.

However, some of the iPhone’s tricks are hidden until you connect it to specific accessories. Did you know, for example, that you can save energy on your Christmas lights using your iPhone? Or improve the quality of your sleep with an iPhone-connected sensor? Or turn your car into a giant Siri-controlled entertainment and communications system? These accessories range in price from affordable to expensive, making them perfect gifts for iPhone users who want to unlock new capabilities. Read on to discover these hidden features, as well as the accessories you should grab or put on your wish list to unlock them…

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In a wide-ranging interview with the Telegraph, Apple CEO Tim Cook has hinted that the company may launch more health-focused products in future – but will keep those separate from the Apple Watch. The reason, he says, is that the FDA approval needed for full-on health devices would slow down the pace of innovation of the Watch.

Cook hints that Apple may have more plans for the health sphere, in a revelation which will intrigue Wall Street, but he doesn’t want the watch itself to become a regulated, government-licensed health product. “We don’t want to put the watch through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process. I wouldn’t mind putting something adjacent to the watch through it, but not the watch, because it would hold us back from innovating too much, the cycles are too long. But you can begin to envision other things that might be adjacent to it — maybe an app, maybe something else.” 

This represents a significant change from expectations …

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