No ratings yet.

On September 12^th, Apple unveiled the most recent iteration of its popular smartwatch line, the Apple Watch Series 4. Now wearables in general and the Apple smartwatch in particular are said to have an outsized influence on many aspects of our live. One field that is supposed to be particularly susceptible to these products is the healthcare industry. I believe, that the Apple watch is poised to impact healthcare in two major ways.

Firstly, Apple is changing the healthcare industry by “gamifying” healthcare, meaning that it turns looking after one’s health into a game that rewards one for doing healthy activities such as hiking. The newest version of the Apple Watch for the first time enables individuals to now also compete with their friends to see who can obtain the highest score when it comes to exercising. Gamification is a novel way of increasing peoples motivation to complete a particular task and letting friends compete with each other for glory is one popular variant of it.

But it is not only on the behavioral side that the Apple watch revolutionizes the healthcare industry, it is also the technology that Apple introduces which will shape healthcare for years to come. Series 4 for the first time has a wrist band which can create an electrocardiogram (ECG). Using the ECG as an input, the Apple Watch then can determine based on one’s heart beat pattern whether one is suffering from Atrial Fibrillation. As of right now, Doctors are in opposition to this particular feature, fearing that due to the difficulty of accurately diagnosing Atrial Fibrillation (AF) based on an ECG, the Apple watch will lead to an increase of false positives where healthy people are being sent to their doctors believing that they suffer from AF. What many of these physicians however overlook is the fact that the Apple watch will provide them with a lot more data that can then be used to both uncover AF and to provide individuals suffering from an arrhythmic heartbeat with the appropriate treatment.

In conclusion, the Apple smart watch affects the healthcare industry because it gamifies looking after ones health and because it provides doctors with more data that enables them to make better decisions for their patients.

 

 

This blog post is based on the following articles:

View at Medium.com

https://hbr.org/2018/10/why-doctors-shouldnt-dismiss-the-apple-watchs-new-ecg-app

No ratings yet.

The explosion of popularity of the term “blockchain” is unlike any other technology I can remember. Even though there were many  technology related fads in the past that were quickly hyped up by the mainstream media such as 3d televisions or VR, no other technology ever rose to such a prominence as blockchain. This has led to a curious development: even though most of the people do not really know what blockchain is about, let alone explain how it works, it is the talk of the town.

Nothing exemplifies the rapid rise of the term “blockchain” into mainstream culture more than the Google Trends graph of the number of times people searched the word “blockchain” in the last five years.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=Blockchain

What is clearly visible is that the searches took off very recently around 2016. An even more interesting fact, however,  is that searches for the term “blockchain” correlate positively with the price of Bitcoin.

https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/price/

This is, in my mind, the symptom of one of the biggest misunderstandings about blockchain: namely that “blockchain = Bitcoin” or put differently, that the main field of application for the blockchain technology lies in the creation of crypto currencies, that could one day replace traditional fiat currencies. What is true is that Bitcoin and other popular crypto currencies such as Ethereum are based on and enabled by the blockchain technology. And thus, it is no surprise that with the meteoritic price rise that Bitcoin has experienced up to very recently, that there is an simultaneous increase in interest into the underlying blockchain technology. The misunderstanding, now, arises from the fact the rise in popularity of Blockchain and Bitcoin is not equaled by a rise in understanding of the technology. This sketch from a popular US talk show perfectly mocks this situation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeMv9uKpAZg

What is important to understand about the blockchain technology is that it is a way to create trust between online parties that does not need a third-party verification. With this trust, different products and services can be created, from currencies to legal contracts. Thus, Bitcoin is only one of the many possible product that can be offered in an internet where trust exists between different people and therefore not at all the same thing as blockchain.

 

 

This blog post is based on the following articles:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/7/17091766/blockchain-bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-meaning

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/misconceptions-about-blockchain-8553262e8ff0

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-about-Bitcoin