Also some feature so older people like with alzheimer can wear a watch and be traced back if they walk out of a nursing home.
The last years had a few cases where old people walked out and later were found dead.
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Yeah, I've been thinking a lot in the last few days about the use case for older people. My late father was a complete technology freak and I got him into quite a few things including smart phones that he embraced with a passion at least equal to my own. Even as far back as 2000 he got a Palm V after seeing me rave about mine which he carried with him constantly for years and used all the time before smart phones took over. I got my first Apple watch (series 6) last Monday and have been thinking a lot since then about how much my dad would have loved it and how we could also have set one up on a Family plan for my frail mother (now also dead) and what we could have done with it, and how my mother would have reacted. I would have loved sharing that experience with them both.
Apple have the seeds of the capability you suggest with the Family features whereby someone can set up an Apple watch for someone else using their iPhone. One can easily imagine that being extended to a "Health Provider" plan where a nursing home or other applicable organisation could set up multiple Apple watches on a single company plan and at that point there is so much value that could be delivered to their clients e.g.
- Enable location ring-fencing and tracking for each watch such that if a wearer went outside of a location ring-fence an alert would be sent to a nominated iPhone or even Apple Watch (probably always carried by the on-duty manager at the home) who could then access location tracking data and potentially, where deemed appropriate and not confusing for a particular client, maybe even try to contact them via walkie talkie.
- I'm not sure if it would be practical to set very tight geo-fences for certain particularly vulnerable patients so that the system could detect if they leave their room and start wandering within the home before potentially actually leaving the building but that would be a nice feature.
Such a health provider plan would also open up the possibility of at-home care providers where carers visit people at home one or two times a day to issue a device to each client where maybe for the most vulnerable similar location-based perimeter could be set up (with signed consent obviously) but in this setting a medication reminder app, already discussed for individuals, could yield even more benefit especially in an at-home care setting. A version for customers of the health provider plan could have the app on each client's watch not only remind the wearer to take meds using a schedule set up by the care provider for each client but also report the feedback (whether the client pressed an "I've done it" button) to a central point so that if any clients fail to indicate that they have complied with the medication regimen a carer could call them or even use the walkie talkie function to find out why they haven't taken the meds.
In any environment the health provider plan might also give access to specialised watch faces with maybe a single big and simple-to-see complication that was programmed to call an emergency number if the wearer hit it and would obviously be disabled if the wearer wasn't capable of not accidentally setting off that technology all the time. Also, if the wearer still had family and/or friends in the area maybe a swipe-right page that was 4 or 9 big tiles that could be set up for them so that they could do one-press phone calls to their friend/family/support circle.
There's probably lots of other stuff that could be done. If Apple did offer up a formal health provider package with central administration and monitoring it might allow all sorts of other value added services to be provided such as basic sanity checking of the regularly taken heart rate and blood-ox measurements for each client reported back to a central admin console, not necessarily to trigger an emergency response (in particular I'm not convinced that the blood-ox sensing is reliable enough for that yet) but so that if something looked like it might be odd the carer could be alerted to take a more accurate reading possibly with a more accurate monitoring device on their next visit.
