Apple Watch is a Passive Verb

(Imagen 3)

When Woz was building computers 50 years ago, he didn’t realize his successors would build medical devices that would receive FDA approval.

I touched on this earlier in my Thursday post about H.R. 238 and its proposal to use AI tools to write prescriptions.

But just in passing. Here’s a deeper, um, dive from May 2024.

“The FDA created the Medical Device Development Tools (MDDT) program to reduce uncertainty in device development.…Through MDDT, the FDA has created a portfolio of qualified tools that sponsors know the agency will accept without needing to reconfirm their suitability for use in a study.”

And now the Apple Watch is one of those qualified tools.

“Apple applied to get its AFib history feature qualified as a MDDT in December (2023). It is the first digital health technology qualified under the program.”

The advantage of using an Apple Watch to gather this data?

“Officials said the wearable can help address the challenges ‘by allowing for passive, opportunistic AFib burden estimation in a wearable form that is already familiar to Apple Watch users.’”

Medical measurements are often skewed by stress from the health experience itself. But if you’re already wearing an Apple Watch, and you always wear an Apple Watch, the passive nature of AFib data collection means you don’t even know you’re being measured.