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iPhone 6 'Phosphorus' Component Likely a Barometric Pressure Sensor, Not Next-Generation M7

It would be nice to have the temperature and humidity sensing as well, but any addition along these lines is good.
 
Could this sensor determine if your phone gets wet and shut itself off until it dries out enough to power back on safely?
 
KeepCalmPeople said:
My wife has hypertension and she uses a Withings blood pressure measuring cuff attached to her iPad to measure her blood pressure every morning. Her doctor likes her to bring her iPad to appointments so she can look at a graph of her blood pressure over the past few weeks/months, so she can assess the overall trend up or down, which might in turn point to the efficacy of her medication.
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I think that's awesome, and likely efficient and easy for her doctor to interpret. Full disclosure, I am a physician, and the last thing I want is to try and interpret data from multiple apps on multiple devices when I have an incredibly limited amount of time to do so. When standardization occurs, then I can see it as being helpful (especially as we are all moving toward the inefficient Epic system), but I will be surprised if that ever happens as there are too many diffenent companies involved.
 
pdaholic said:
I think that's awesome, and likely efficient and easy for her doctor to interpret. Full disclosure, I am a physician, and the last thing I want is to try and interpret data from multiple apps on multiple devices when I have an incredibly limited amount of time to do so. When standardization occurs, then I can see it as being helpful (especially as we are all moving toward the inefficient Epic system), but I will be surprised if that ever happens as there are too many diffenent companies involved.
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Indeed and like with mapping, it's something all companies want to get on board with a worldwide compatible system, that reads and collates data in the same way across multiple platforms.

In other words, Apple is the VERY WORST company to do anything like this.
 
rmbpuser said:
Siri: "It's cold you should put on a blanket!"
- "No thank you Siri!"

1 week later

Doctor: "So you have the flu? I can see here Siri asked you to put a blanket on and you ignored her, I would have to notify your insurance company!"
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Let me fix that:

Doctor: "So you have the flu? I can see here Siri asked you to put a blanket on and you ignored her, she has notified your insurance company!
 
Piggie said:
In other words, Apple is the VERY WORST company to do anything like this.
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Amen, Piggie. I can only hope that Apple's various consultants are steering them in the right direction, but I seriously doubt that those consultants include physicians who, in the end, will be the ones responsible for interpreting and acting on the various health data collected.
 
manu chao said:
The closest they could get would be a temperature sensor the headphone remote. But even that is so close to the body that unless the body temperature isn't much above the ambient temperature, reading will still be biased.

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Most barometers I know also measure the temperature because they have to. The pressure sensing mechanism is usually temperature-sensitive, meaning that changing the temperature will change its readings thus a temperature sensor is added to be able to correct for that. Where ambient pressure sensors might differ is whether they also provide that temperature reading along with the pressure data or only use it internally.
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Apple did patent smart headphones and your rist temperature doesn't change too much like your pocket and if the sensor would be facing out it would be very unlikely to be effected by the heat

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kdarling said:
Right. Other phones have had ambient temperature sensors, with internal sensors for correction.

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It can't.

That was just an overall list of what the chip could be used for in equipment, not necessarily a smartphone.

Unless it's a smartphone with a hole to breathe into :)
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I got nowhere the experience as you have :rolleyes: but the chip can measure breathing according to Bosch - I don't know how but I did see something the other day which can say from the colour of your blood how oxygenated it is being used - it beamed a red light into the skin and a sensor then figured it out weather you had enough oxygen in your blood - and the more you breath the more oxygen you get. I'm no expert on this though it was something I saw the other day! :cool:
 
I think I found why Apple may have used "phosphorus" as codename to describe this barometric sensor :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometric_light

Barometric light is a name for the light that is emitted by a mercury-filled barometer tube when the tube is shaken. The discovery of this phenomenon in 1675 revealed the possibility of electric lighting.
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Apparently, scientist Johann Bernoulli described this phenomenon as "Le nouveau phosphore" (New phosphorus [i.e., a substance that glows in the dark])
 
pdaholic said:
Amen, Piggie. I can only hope that Apple's various consultants are steering them in the right direction, but I seriously doubt that those consultants include physicians who, in the end, will be the ones responsible for interpreting and acting on the various health data collected.
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If this type of thing is to work on the large scale in the future, and health monitoring, whilst, let's be honest, uninteresting most of the time for the young healthy individual, and let's be honest, America esp, the most widespread use of the iPhone ain't exactly the land of the fit.

We want a system that the medical profession can perhaps in time use or gather data from to help a patient that is not just restricted to Apple products. Given that the vast majority of phone users worldwide use other brands, and this will probably continue to grow.

So Apple, by all means create a standard, but if you genuinely and I mean GENUINELY care about people's health and not just their own profits, then licence this tech so that other brands of phones and devices can also use the same sensors to gather the same data that can be used.
 
Serban said:
"The poster had previously claimed a schematic showed the iPhone 6 carrying the same 1 GB RAM found in previous A-series chips, but that was quickly revealed to be a reference to an aspect of flash storage rather than RAM."

So the rumour about 1Gb Ram was mistaken with something else?
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It's gonna be 2GB RAM. You can quote me on this.
 
captain cadet said:
... the chip can measure breathing according to Bosch -
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It's just an atmospheric pressure sensor, like an altimeter in a plane or a barometer on your kitchen wall.

It can't measure breathing unless you have an air tube from your lips to the sensor, and a spirometer would require even more.

swingerofbirch said:
I was assuming the implication was that a device attached to the iPhone could work as a spirometer by using this new processor.
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To make a spirometer, I believe you'd need TWO of these barometric sensors, in order to measure differential pressure across a tube in order to calculate the flow rate.

You'd also need a fairly big hole in the outside of the phone case to plug hoses into to reach the sensor(s), which seems like a really unlikely thing for Apple to do, as I'm sure you'd agree.

Bosch simply lists it as a possible use for the sensor if you needed parts to build such a device.

.
 
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jlake02 said:
Leave it to the MR forums!! :D :D

Seriously though... with all the available tech (NFC, wireless charging) we're getting a barometric pressure sensor?!? I would hope this is for the iWatch and not the iPhone.

I'll wait until Sept. 9th and hope to be wow'd, but right now I'm sitting here shaking my head. Give me something I give a crap about.:mad:


:apple:
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Thats a bit short sighted. I am not sure exactly how it would work, but if every iphone fed weather related data and location into a system I would imagine it could do big things for weather analysis/reporting/forecasting. NFC and wireless charging are small things that exist, that may or may not be useful, and that Apple could easily choose to implement with little effort - not having them is a design choice. But access to hyperlocal weather data from on hundreds of millions of GPS located portable weather stations seems much bigger and more exciting to me.
 
lk400 said:
Thats a bit short sighted. I am not sure exactly how it would work, but if every iphone fed weather related data and location into a system I would imagine it could do big things for weather analysis/reporting/forecasting. NFC and wireless charging are small things that exist, that may or may not be useful, and that Apple could easily choose to implement with little effort - not having them is a design choice. But access to hyperlocal weather data from on hundreds of millions of GPS located portable weather stations seems much bigger and more exciting to me.
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I'm sure you are right but honestly... I don't care much about contributing to weather forecasts. In fact, I'd disable it. Don't want the GPS eating my battery just to be one of millions of minions feeding weather data.
 
jlake02 said:
I'm sure you are right but honestly... I don't care much about contributing to weather forecasts. In fact, I'd disable it. Don't want the GPS eating my battery just to be one of millions of minions feeding weather data.
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What if it was crowd-sourcing vertical location data?

What if you went up an elevator, and when you got out, and walked around near a window, your phone got a GPS lock on your altitude and sent it back to a database on the height between floors in that building. Or heck, even asked you, "What floor is this?"

Kind of like how all iPhones collect cell tower and WiFi hotspot info, and send it back to Apple to use for locating purposes by everyone.
 
jlake02 said:
I'm sure you are right but honestly... I don't care much about contributing to weather forecasts. In fact, I'd disable it. Don't want the GPS eating my battery just to be one of millions of minions feeding weather data.
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And thats a fair concern - although I would hope that it would just ping your location / sensors every so often kind of like cell tower search etc does - perhaps battery drain is minimal.

Maybe its just me as weather interests me, but if there were some smart algorithms behind it, having so many realtime data points would seem to open up amazing things for forecasting and observations.
 
lk400 said:
And thats a fair concern - although I would hope that it would just ping your location / sensors every so often kind of like cell tower search etc does - perhaps battery drain is minimal.

Maybe its just me as weather interests me, but if there were some smart algorithms behind it, having so many realtime data points would seem to open up amazing things for forecasting and observations.
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I agree, I would give anything for an iPhone app that can accurately tell me its raining outside. More than half of my weather apps are showing cloudy with some percentage chance of rain while it is already raining cats and dogs outside!

I believe I speak for the majority when I say this is going to be of tremendous use for people like me who appreciate precise weather reporting!
 
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