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Doctors rubbish the iWatch

by on12 September 2014

About as useful as a course of leeches

While the Tame Apple Press has been raving about how Apple’s iWatch is going to be ground breaking for the medical and fitness industry, doctors were uncertain if it had any point at all.

Fitness experts say that the iWatch does not surpass the competition, so far you can get everything that the iWatch does on much cheaper devices. Doctors say that as far as health monitoring is concerned it does not look that useful either.

Joshua Landy, a Toronto, Canada-based critical care specialist and the chief medical officer for Figure 1, a health startup said looking at patients' data from a watch was about as useful as looking at the same data collected in a notebook.

Danielle Levitas, a technology analyst for IDC, described the health and fitness aspects were much less than expected.

"I was expecting there to be some true healthcare applications that would take it a step further beyond wellness,” she said.

The watch did not track sleep, like Jawbone's UP wrist band for example. She also though that the decision to offload GPS and Wi-FI to the phone, presumably to keep the price tag at $349 was frustrating

Apple may have deliberately avoided mentioning medical use-cases for the watch for now to avoid attracting attention from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. If it pushes this too far then Apple might be forced by the FDA to prove its usefulness as a medical monitoring device.

However in doing so it joins thousands of unregulated wellness applications on the market which can’t really do that much.

Apple is rumoured to be adding in more health sensors to the device for future versions of the toy, but by then it might have found that the whole watch thing really was a turkey.

 

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