Parsing health gizmos
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Eric Topol does a deep dive on the new improved Apple Watch.
On September 9th, Apple announced it was revamping its Apple Watch Health Sensing System, rolling out a Readiness score (0 to 10), and increasing the frequency of heart rate variability (HRV) outputs 24-fold. This can be viewed as upping its competition with various other consumer wearable sensors. These “readiness scores” as a composite of multiple metrics, with heart rate variability (HRV) being front and center for most. The majority of Americans are now using wearable sensors, which equates to well over 100 million adults. HRV and Readiness scores are increasingly being marketed as a measurement of autonomic nervous system health, a digital marker for future disease, a clock for biological age, and a holistic metric to promote healthspan and even longevity. (Apple also introduced a new longevity tab and “Health Age”.) None of this has been proven. In this edition of Ground Truths I am going to review what we know about heart rate variability and readiness scores.
My takeaway: No Apple Watch or other wearable for me. And I'll still eat my ice cream.
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My mother has an Apple Watch, earlier model. The main reason we got is for fall detection. And it seems to work pretty for that. (She fell once recently but thankfully was fine)
I don’t think she uses it for much else health-wise, beyond sort of making a note of how much movement she gets.
I personally do not want a “wearable” of any kind. I already work very hard to keep my phone notifications to a bare minimum, the last thing I want is a notification I can feel on my physical body!
If I’m worried about heart rate etc., I'd rather have a designated device.
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I have an Ouro ring that I like. I tried at various times to wear an Apple Watch, but it always boiled down to "When do I charge it?" If I want it to monitor things that happen in my sleep, then I'm stuck charging it in the daytime, when I want it to monitor exercise and...you know...tell me the time.
The Ouro only needs charging every week or so, and it doesn't take long to charge, so it doesn't drop into the "I haven't thought about it since last week, so it's still on the charger" memory hole.
I got it to monitor my oxygen levels at night, since I was right on the cusp of whether I needed a CPAP machine and I couldn't sleep with the thing. Maybe I didn't need it! Well, the Ouro isn't rated to give sufficiently granular data for that, but I found that I liked it for other things. It tracks my steps better than my phone and it's easy to track exercise on the app. It does give some usable sleep data, although not oxygen levels. It gives HRV numbers, but I'm not sure they're valid.
The most interesting thing happened in May, when it was saying I had signs of significant stress, but they didn't look all that awful--temperature elevated by a degree, sleep disturbance, change in HRV. Then a rash broke out on my face. It was shingles, but the ring knew something was wrong before I did. (I'm fine now. It was a mild case, probably because I had the vaccination, and I got antivirals early.)
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i’m a bit of a Fitbit addict, although I don’t like when they killed the Fitbit app and make us use google now.
I don’t overly trust the absolute metrics, but I think it is an excellent indication of direction, which is to say am I getting more or less exercise, more or less sleep etc.
I mean if I go for 4 mile walk and I don’t have my Fitbit on, did I really burn any calories?
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Eric Topol does a deep dive on the new improved Apple Watch.
On September 9th, Apple announced it was revamping its Apple Watch Health Sensing System, rolling out a Readiness score (0 to 10), and increasing the frequency of heart rate variability (HRV) outputs 24-fold. This can be viewed as upping its competition with various other consumer wearable sensors. These “readiness scores” as a composite of multiple metrics, with heart rate variability (HRV) being front and center for most. The majority of Americans are now using wearable sensors, which equates to well over 100 million adults. HRV and Readiness scores are increasingly being marketed as a measurement of autonomic nervous system health, a digital marker for future disease, a clock for biological age, and a holistic metric to promote healthspan and even longevity. (Apple also introduced a new longevity tab and “Health Age”.) None of this has been proven. In this edition of Ground Truths I am going to review what we know about heart rate variability and readiness scores.
My takeaway: No Apple Watch or other wearable for me. And I'll still eat my ice cream.
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