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Report: Apple Scaling Back Internal 'HealthHabit' Project for Employee Health Tracking and Coaching

EdT said:
there isn't any way I will use one of their devices for anything, health or otherwise, that can be used against me by a company or government.
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Um. You know you're... I mean... you're carrying around a device that tracks your location by GPS, by cell tower data. You know people have been incarcerated simply by the tower pings their phones have made and those timestamps right?

What does a phone do that you think a government could not use against you?
 
OMG the crazy on these comments...

This article says that Apple is scaling back an internal program to track employee health. This was a division inside the Health team. That's it. That's all it says. Apple's scaling back the staffing of this.

Comments:

Apple has stopped innovating
- How does an internal health tracking program relate to innovation?

Employees don't want to be tracked
- Thousands of companies use health-tracking tools to provide discounts on health insurance and other benefits. And nothing in the article says that Apple was requiring participation in this.

I won't use any device that has information that can be used against me!
- Sent from my iPhone which is currently at 37.322998, -122.032182

Strange to see Apple getting out of Health considering Fitbit was bought by Google
- Did you read the article? The Health division has hundreds of people, and this was an internal project.

It's probably because of the issues reported with Apple's internal health clinic data
- Okay this one probably IS related, as it's actually sourced by the commenter, and backed up in a secondary source. https://www.patentlyapple.com/paten...re-service-plan-by-noting-that-its-strug.html

Apple wants to make a cut of the insurance fees for Apple-watch initiated claims, and send people to their selected doctors.
- Based on...........? Pretty sure that Apple would rather just make money on the watches than wade into healthcare management. But if the company had a way to make insurance less crazy, more affordable, or easier to get a good doctor, and what it took is me to opt into a program to do so, then personally I'm in.

Tim got headlines for launching this, now it's all business.
- This is an internal project at Apple. It's called HealthHabit. Go google that and find me any references to the launch of this internal project.

Employees don't want their employers tracking their health data.
- You're kidding right? Our health care policies are provided by our employers. They have no more access to my paper records than they do the data on my watch. An employee opt-in health monitoring program, of which there are many, doesn't share the data with your employer. It's shared with your healthcare insurer, who already knows absolutely all about your health data.
 
davidjschloss said:
Oh FFS. Every country has its own bureaucracy and procedures for certifying health devices. They're often byzantine and complicated to navigate.

So, with each watch they should wait until the technology has been approved in EVERY COUNTRY before rolling it out?

Wouldn't that lead to....fewer people having access to it?

Right now there are 330-ish million people in the US. So your idea is the watch shouldn't be made available until they can get every country verified on launch day? That would mean that 330M people would have to wait to get a technology that could save their lives until Zimbabwe and the Isle of Man approved it. Why did I pick those countries? Because the Isle of Man has 84,000 residents, yet they're able to use Blood Ox, ECG and Irregular Rhythm Notification, but Zimbabwe is 14M and can only use Blood Ox, they haven't approve the ECG use yet.

There are 100 countries or regions on Apple's list of countries that can use ECG features and irregular rhythmhm. There are about 150 countries that can use Blood Ox.


So Apple shouldn't roll these technologies out to 100 countries until the other 50 allow them to? And what happens when a country doesn't approve the medical use? Do they just skip putting out that watch until every country on the planet has signed on?

The UN recognizes about 195 countries. Is 100 countries really not high enough for approval of all three technologies to be considered "to as many users as possible"?

Incidentally India is able to use all three services, mainland China can only use Blood Ox. Having both US and India supported means right there with 2 countries, 1.6B people can have access to all three technologies, and for Blood Ox that number jumps to 3B people.

IOW 25% of the Earth's population can use all three of the health services, and about 1/3 of the earth can use Blood Ox. And they all can use pulse.
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They could start their applications when their product is ready. Instead they don't even bother until launch. Keeping features secret for marketing purposes is far more important to Tim than having those features available to non-USA customers.
 
Of course they start the a
Khedron said:
They could start their applications when their product is ready. Instead they don't even bother until launch. Keeping features secret for marketing purposes is far more important to Tim than having those features available to non-USA customers.
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Of course they start the application process before the product is released. Otherwise at launch NO COUNTRIES would have support for the health features at launch. There are 195 countries on the planet. They don't all take the same amount of time to get approval, and all of them need the features localized to their language. (It's no good if you have support in Bulgaria but you can't understand the health data because it's not localized to Bulgarian.)

Of course they prioritize some of them. Some of them are easier to get approval, some are harder. Some have bigger market share, some smaller.

I don't know what you think Apple should do, send out hundreds of people to every country, start the approval process for a feature and then wait until they've all signed on? You seem to be saying you have evidence they don't start the approval process for countries until after launch, I'd like to see that material.

Otherwise, for all you know, they're applying on the same day in every country and adding them in the order they're approved. But again, even if not, so what? Should the 320M people in the US have to wait until someone files the paperwork in Isle of Man? Should Zimbabwe not get the features because another African country hasn't approved it?

You want Apple to have the ability to make these life-saving technologies, but also they shouldn't do it in a way that provides them the financial gain to make developing these technologies worth it for them.

Edit: And FWIW most of the rumors of new products show up on this site when the applications for the technologies appear in other countries, so we already know that Apple applies for things before launch.
 
Statistics are very clear about these absolute numbers: more people hospitalised who are not wearing the Apple Watch than there are wearing the Apple Watch...

from the same stats: in absolute numbers more men with short hair are hospitalised than men with very, very long hair.
 
davidjschloss said:
Apple has stopped innovating
- How does an internal health tracking program relate to innovation?
Click to expand...
Well for one, as someone else said, they don't know what to focus on. They're spreading themselves too thin with services, etc. (ok this is very open to interpratation but it does sometimes feel that way) Regardless, my comment is not just for Apple, a lot of tech will hit a plateau soon. It's already a small angled slope.

iOS, Mac OS, Watch OS ... there are hardly any new noteworthy features added with each new iteration. You have to be kind of blind to not see it imo.. However, I welcome being surprised. And with the hardware sometimes as well, I mean, blood oxygen levels..? Why not just... buy a $15 oxymeter that does the same thing and probably better/more accurately. One hardly needs to monitor blood oxigen anyway.
 
I wouldn't like it if my boss was able to track my medical information. He has no business of knowing what is going on, on a medical bases.
 
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