Count me out
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The road to “make America healthy again” will apparently be paved with Apple Watches. Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has just unveiled a campaign that will try to encourage the widespread use of wearables.
RFK Jr. announced the initiative Tuesday afternoon during a House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee meeting to discuss the HHS’ budget request for the upcoming fiscal year. In response to a question from representative Troy Balderson (R-Ohio) about wearables, Kennedy revealed that HHS will soon conduct one of the agency’s largest ever advertising campaigns to promote their use. He added that in his ideal future, every American will be donning a wearable within the next four years.
I monitor my health without much high tech stuff. The devices are great if there's a reason you need one or you feel that they work for you to help establish good exercise habits. I'm just not someone who wears a device to count my steps, monitor my heart rate, or tell me how I slept.
Oh, and of course there's this:
It’s worth noting that the current nominee for the U.S. Surgeon General, Casey Means, is the co-founder of a company that provides continuous glucose monitors and other health trackers to clients. Means has argued that CGM is the “most powerful technology for generating the data and awareness to rectify our Bad Energy crisis in the Western world.”
Overhyping aside, people are also worried about the possible loss of privacy that could come from the mass adoption of wearables. While wearable tech might be able to detect early signs of overheating among outside workers, for instance, privacy advocates and labor rights groups have warned that there are few guardrails in place today that could prevent employers from leveraging the health-related data collected from these devices against workers. Breaches and hacks could also put our personal data in the hands of not-so-scrupulous people.
Signed,
wtg, Luddite-in-chief -
This post is deleted!
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I try to wear a watch just to avoid pulling out my phone to find out the time.
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I have a Watch. I have to wear a watch at school because we are tied to the bells. So a Watch allows me to do things like have alarms go to my wrist rather than my phone (as in, “recess in 3 minutes”) and I use it to do things like set timers for kid activities or to talk a quick note without having my phone out. I find it really useful. I also use it to monitor my heart rate, since I have SVT and I like to have some recorded data to show me how frequently I’m having episodes and how long their are lasting.
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I’m not wearing one unless it’s gold and has Spanky’s face on it!
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When my $ watch got saltwater in it, the cost to repair it almost as much as original price. Told them to keep it. Bought a Garmin that is smarter than I am. It counts steps and tells me who is calling plus more than I want to know. Smartwatches and AI could be a scary thing.
May have to go back to a Timex. Then again, they are copying some expensive watches, but those look like the cheap copies they are.
