Pre-Apple Watch, the more time passes the less seems to happen

In some ways, many things have changed since I last wrote in this blog.

• Android Fit is out in the Lollipop OS update, as is Apple's HeathKit
• More Android Wear devices are out
• Samsung has released a bunch more watches, and more significantly, a medically-advanced band reference design (Simband)
• Apple Watch has been announced

But in many ways nothing has changed, nor is going to change for many months.

During this time, we can predict:

• More Android-based hardware will be released, but there won't be a "killer design"
• Samsung will continue its shotgun experimentation with consumer design
• People will continue to rumourmill about Apple Watch

But the bottomline is everyone will be waiting for the Apple Watch launch to see how big the smartwatch market will actually be. At least 24 million, according to UBS.

In the meantime, niche parts of the market are shaping up in a very interesting way.

One example of this is the approach from current tracker leader Fitbit, which has carefully upscaled its range to just below smartwatch level (or fitness super watch as it labels it).

More significantly, its two future devices have constant heartrate detection, underlining that this is now a standard feature in the market.

Certainly, I'll be picking up a Charge HR band when they're released.

And similarly the other devices that are catching my eye are those that input some elements of smartwatch functionality within the classic watch aesthetic.

Prime example is current Indiegogo project Nevo (above), which is a nice analogue watch with Misfit-like activity indicator lights around the dial. It can also alert you to notifications. Best of all, it looks like a nice watch. 

Apple Watch - a sub-standard health wearable?

Amidst all the hype, there was an interesting take on the Apple Watch from one expert.

Although Apple hasn't revealed full details about HealthKit and how it will integrate with the watch - which won't be out until early 2015 anyhow, Niharika Midha, who covers medical devices for GlobalData called the Apple Watch a "robust offering".

But noted its, "health and fitness trackers are largely dependent on the iPhone's WiFi and Global Positioning System capabilities, which is a considerable drawback in comparison to other vendors.

"For example, the Samsung Gear S has a built-in GPS and can be used to track activities without requiring connection to the handset."

Indeed, GPS seems to be surprising omission, as many sports watches have this feature as standard. It seems unlikely size would be an issue, although the impact on battery life might be.

"At present, the product is not substantially superior to existing devices in terms of health tracking mechanisms," Midha comments, although adding that presumably Apple will make a watch with standalone GPS functions at some point.

Indeed, when it comes to dedicated medical wearable devices, it's not even clear that a watch configuration would be optimal.

"Google's development of smart contact lenses targeted towards monitoring glucose levels in diabetic patients is potentially groundbreaking," he notes. 

Two problems with the Quantifiable Self - quantification and self

Anyone who works with data knows what a messy situation it always is. All data - at least all useful data - has issues, ranging from how it’s recorded to how it should be processed. This is particularly the case with systems that rely on some human input. Self-reporting is notoriously hopeless, with research suggesting, for example, that the self reporting of ‘calories eaten’ is under reported by around 30 percent. Even using a device like my Fitbit Flex, you have to remember to switch it into sleep mode for it to automatically measure sleep (yes, I know you can manually add it later, but who does?). Similarly my Nike+ GPS watch can take anything up to a minute to lock onto the satellites it requires. Not to mention, randomly resetting itself to 2010 if it runs out of power, and the five or so times it never got a satellite signal during a 30 minute run. Margin of error These are slight errors of self and quantification, of course. More worrying - given we appear to be ready to hand over aspect of personal medicine to such devices (c.f. Apple’s HealthKit) - is the basic accuracy of the devices we’re using. A recent example. I went for a run using a Beurer fitness watch with heart monitor, and my Nike+ GPS watch. Both were started at the same time, but at the end of the run, the Nike+ watch listed 403 calories burnt, while the Beurer said 320. Assuming the Beurer+heart rate monitor is the more accurate of the two, that’s a 26 percent difference. Combining my two examples then, I could be over-exaggerating my calories burnt by 26 percent and under-exaggerating my calories in by 30 percent. That’s massive inaccuracy. Life and death? Yet, again, it could be said this is a trivial case. Where it does get concerning is when devices say they can accurately measure proper medical metrics such as cholesterol or blood sugar, or for some people even heart rate and calories (in and out). Not to mention when doctors are relying on people using the devices properly,: and that could be whether legitimate or illegitimate misuse c.f. the statistics about how many people complete their set treatment of antibiotics (22 percent of 16-24 year olds) But maybe I’m being too pessimistic. The Quantified Self can clearly produce great results, even with the current generation of devices. In most of these cases, though, it works because the motivation behind the Quantified Self is the self. Initial self awareness and self motivation enables quantification to positively feedback into a better self. Where we need to be concerned is in the cases of those where we expect quantification alone to drive self and change behaviour. 

Apple, HealthKit and the Walled Garden

Somewhere between a bang and a whimper, Apple announced its HealthKit platform.

This being revealed at the company's developer conference, Apple didn't talk about any consumer hardware. Instead its focus was to talk briefly about how the platform unifies multiple health metrics.

Combined with Apple's linked and overarching Health app, it looks like the baseline configuration won't offer anything different that the current generation of health trackers - tracking calories, sleep, heart rate etc - plus what looks like more comprehensive medical metrics, listed as ominously as Diagnostics. Lab Results and Medical ID.

Apple has said that HealthKit will be open to thirdparties, mentioning for example the Nike+ fitness platform. But the point of the platform is that within iOS, you'll be able to share whatever data you're monitoring with integrated apps, including links to professional healthcare providers.

US regional provider Mayo Clinic has been particularly keen to praise the move.

Perhaps the biggest unanswered question, however, is how open the data is, particularly in the longterm?

Obviously there's a privacy issue involved in terms of how medical data is shared and made available in the short-term, but equally, given Apple's proprietary nature (aka The Walled Garden), it seems unlikely it's adopting open industry standards, which as I've argued is a main longterm concern with this sort of fitness and health data.

And maybe, as important, it's not clear how Apple's iOS 8-centric approach will en/discourage the wider health and fitness app industry, which is something that will require support for Android and the web.

After all, we're not going to be using Apple hardware for the rest of our lives.