As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am locked into the Apple ecosystem. The latest addition was the Apple Watch. I had not considered buying one since I had an excellent analog wristwatch that kept perfect time and was powered by light and thus did not require any batteries. As long as you did not keep it in darkness such as put away in a drawer, it kept perfect time. I had had it for over a decade with no problems, so never felt the need to get another watch.
But since I live mostly alone, my daughters were concerned about me falling and not being able to call for help so they bought an Apple Watch for me because it has the feature that if you do have a hard fall, it detects it and will alert you. If you do not cancel the alert and are immobile for a minute, it will call 911 emergency services and your emergency contacts and send your GPS location to them. It will also send any medical information, such as the medications you are on, allergies, and any other health information you wish to share.
But as I discovered once I started using it, the watch monitors way more things about me than I had imagined. It checks my sleep each night and tells me each morning how much time I spent awake or in REM sleep or core sleep or deep sleep. It reports on my heart rate, wrist temperature, various markers of physical activity such as steps taken and energy consumption and how I walk, blood oxygen levels, respiratory rate, and lets me know if they are within the normal ranges, and can alert me if my heart rate becomes irregular. A useful nudge is that it reminds me every hour to get up and move around for a bit which, for someone like me who sits a lot reading and working on the computer, is not a bad thing.
It is really quite extraordinary that all this information can be obtained from sensors that are on the back of the watch that are in contact with the skin on my wrist. At present, the only thing I know is my nightly sleep and that is because the watch reports that to me every morning if I had sufficient sleep. I do not check the other vital signs.
The downside is that if you are prone to hypochondria, one can become obsessed with monitoring all this data, looking for anomalous results. Another downside is what some like Rat may be experiencing, that any exercise and activity that one does is not ‘real’ unless it is recorded on the watch or phone.
Initially, like Rat, I set a goal and would monitor how many steps I took each day and would be slightly irked if I had not been wearing my watch or carrying my phone so that my recorded totals were less than what they should have been. I have overcome that tendency and now rarely look at any data, figuring that maintaining a daily active routine is more important than obsessing over meeting specific targets.
So, Apple is collecting your biometric data from your watch. Who are they selling it to?
Well, it can produce numbers for all of these things… However, the actual accuracy of those numbers is up for debate. Some of them are probably quite good, others, less so… For example, Apple watch accuracy in monitoring health metrics: a systematic review and meta-analysis:
The quality of the data is more important than the amount of data. Certainly they can tell some things by contact with your wrist but feature creep will tend to have software devs wanting to add new measurements. Beyond core things that are easily measured by small sensors on your wrist I wouldn’t really trust it.
For example I’m not sure how it measures steps and until I knew I probably wouldn’t pay much attention to that even though the quote by Dunc above suggests it’s accurate. I have no interest in wearable computers but if I did, I’d probably try to figure out whether the study has been peer reviewed or not as well.
If I’m remembering correctly Mano has covered some weird health fads before including a vibrating belt machine. I only saw it actually used once but my parents had one of those things and it kind of taught me to be skeptical of weird health claims. Even as a child trivial amounts of questioning rapidly led me to understand the claims were BS.
@ Dunc
All that says is some things are hard to measure -- because of course they are! It’s a thing on your wrist.
@ 3 lanir
It’s a measuring device, not a treatment.
I’m not endorsing the thing -- it just seems lots of people see anything remotely “health” oriented as a chance to trot out the “big pharma” conspiracies
How do you clean it; what does your manual say?
I’d be afraid of accidentally dropping it in the sink or toilet, or forgetting I had it on in the shower. That is, those things might happen to a regular watch. But this one (presumably) has sensitive instruments that are fairly exposed.
My smartphone has the most drop-resistance and water-resistance I could find on the market back in 2020. The manual for it still says do not wash, and use a ‘clean dry microfiber cloth’. I do use 92 percent ethanol solution because that’s just not reasonable enough to get off the stuff that ends up on mine. It’s as close to the ‘dry’ as I can get, since it evaporates very quickly.
How does a watch measure your sleep? Do people actually wear their watches 24 hours a day? I haven’t even worn a watch of any kind in my adult life because I can’t stand the feel of them cinched against my skin.
Trickster @#7,
Yes, you have to wear the Apple Watch when you sleep for it to measure the quality of your sleep.
However, I used to have an app on my phone that claimed to measure sleep quality when kept on the bedside table.
They seem to be enormous.
I don’t think I could wear a watch that’s wider than my wrist.
Katydid #1:
It seems that the collected data which gets shared between your devices (most of it, but not all) is automatically encrypted and then gathered within your AppleID / Apple account where only you can decrypt it and use it. Apple sets out a big stall on privacy, and that it does not sell that data. Trust that assurance as far as you will.
When Apple controls the encryption that you put on it, and when Apple can help you reset your passwords and so on, then it follows that your data is not entirely secure from Apple. (Or, indeed, any of them, but here you’re asking about Apple which seems to be by far the most privacy-conscious of all the major players.)
As a USA company, Apple can be forced by government security order to give up anything that Apple can get out of your apple account, and not tell you about it.
Though it seems unlikely (at the moment) that the USA government will be much interested in hundreds of millions of people’s wristwatch readings, or selling that hot steaming mess to anyone.
Presumably it’s far, far less unlikely these days that someone might use a national security pretext to mine such data from known terrorists, and these days that apparently includes Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Jerome Powell; that someone would get Grok to prove that the unpatriotic traitor walked far fewer steps on specific days than would be appropriate for being at their primary residences and therefore mortgage fraud requiring deportation and cancel the next elections in all
blue congressional districtsareas with known sympathisers. Praise be. (Under his eye.)(The above paragraph contains far too much doom-mongering to count as acerbic commentary.)
Frankly, I’m a bit skeptical that collecting data with no specific question in mind is all that useful. I think it’s likely to lead to finding correlations where there are no causal paths. I’m not saying it’s bad to collect data, I like looking over trend data to see what I can discover, but it is best to have some question which you know the data will answer before looking at it.
For example, say I have been wearing an Apple watch for the last year, and I find I’m feeling pretty tired recently. I look at the data for the last few days and I find that according to the watch I haven’t been sleeping well. And it started three days ago. Okay, what happened three days ago? I look through the watch data again and I find I had a 40 minute period where my blood pressure and heart rate were rising. Ahah! My sleeping disruption occurred after this blood pressure spike, let’s show this to my doctor and maybe he’ll adjust my medication to prevent this from happening!
However, if I had a complete playback of the last three days I might have noticed that I changed my evening snack from parmesan cheese to a smoked cheddar and the smoked cheddar isn’t agreeing with me, disrupting my sleep. While the blood pressure and heart rate spike was caused by being on the phone with my ISP, getting angrier and angrier because I couldn’t reach an actual human being. Completely unrelated to my poor sleep. Human beings are very good at making connections where there are none. Once we have made a connection, it’s hard to get rid of and many of us want to act on it. Even if the correlation itself is shown to be false, it’s hard for us to give up our beliefs.
Don’t get me wrong. I love data and looking at data. I love when the data collection improves and is more precise and accurate. But even when a causal path exists, getting finer resolution of the data can lead to incorrect conclusions, and actions. As the resolution of mammograms increased, more and more women were found with lumps in their breasts, lumps which were undetectable by older technologies. This scared a lot of women, and led many of them to take actions which we know now may have been unnecessary. I don’t blame the women or doctors for recommending and following the known standard of care at the time, that was the correct thing to do. However, subsequent to getting the tools for higher resolution on mammogram data, additional analysis was done which found that maybe a lot of those newly found, very tiny, lumps are benign. They should be monitored, but they don’t necessarily require immediate surgery. Surgery is an option, and if a woman wants that, knowing the risks involved, that’s her decision. The point is that the standard of care had to catch up to the higher resolution data, and the higher resolution data miss-led women into believing they had a high risk of cancer which was not true.
I like data, but all data needs to be understood in the context of the details of it’s collection, related data from other sources, and the question being considered.
@10, EigenSprocketUK, thanks for the explanation!
Anecdata: a couple of years ago, a coworker was put on a doctor-supervised weight loss program. He was given a particular scale to use every morning that collected weight, fat percentage, etc. data and sent it to his doctor’s office via its wifi connection. Not long after that, completely out of the blue, he began to get advertisements sent to his home for various weight-loss pills and potions and procedures. Obviously his special scale data was being perused by people other than his doctor’s office.