Apple’s ecosystem of products has always been described as bold, beautiful and ground-breaking. From its innovative reinvention of the mobile phone to how far it has redefined the personal device ecosystem, the company has time and again proven that its work can act as a generational change-maker.
The company has made significant strides especially in utilizing its products to improve the realm of personal healthcare. Among the most seminal contributions by the company is the Health app, which was created with the intention of centralizing users’ health needs and information. The utility of this app ranges from activity tracking and collecting mood metrics, to medication management and health information storage, to name a few examples. However, with its expanding hardware ecosystem, Apple has since undertaken numerous other ventures into healthcare, going far beyond a simple application. For example, with Apple Watch, users can easily track activities and calories. Perhaps most ground-breaking is the device’s ECG function, which enables users to collect insights on their own cardiac functions. Essentially, Apple Watch users can use the app to record “an electrocardiogram which represents the electrical pulses that make your heart beat. The ECG app checks these pulses to get your heart rate and see if the upper and lower chambers of your heart are in rhythm.”
In a widely celebrated report, the company detailed the work that went behind developing this tool for arrythmia detection and the clinical validations that were performed via the very famous Apple Heart Study. The seminal research on this was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and further studies have since emerged. One recent study was published in the Cardiovascular Digital Health Journal, which found relatively high levels of sensitivity and specificity by the device.
Beyond just the watch and the application ecosystem, Apple pushes forward in healthcare; its latest foray is with its work in spatial computing, especially with the Vision Pro augmented/virtual reality device that the company recently released. The goal behind the Vision Pro is to “seamlessly blend digital content with [a user’s] physical space.”
A statement released by Apple last month details how the company will potentially ramp up its work in healthcare using this new platform. Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, explained her excitement for developers to start working on applications for the device, which will enable “new possibilities for physicians, frontline workers, and even students” across the ecosystem. A few use-cases include enabling healthcare providers to visualize pre-operative and intra-operative details, simulate their work with advanced medical devices, and enable better educational and training opportunities for larger teams via digital collaboration. For example, applications on the Vision Pro allow “surgeons, medical students, and patients to view immersive, interactive holograms of the human body captured through medical scans in their real-world environment,” taking education and immersion to the next level.
Overall, the work in this ecosystem is just getting started. Apple has not always been the first to market, but prides itself on creating incredibly successful platforms that have high customer engagement, an uncanny ability to disrupt, and immense user loyalty. Its spatial computing platform will likely be just as successful in the coming years, as the company continues to refine the product and makes it more affordable and scalable. With healthcare providers becoming increasingly tech enabled, there is significant opportunity in the years to come. Finally, with regards to patients, who are the most important stakeholders, cutting edge hardware and strides in innovation like these have immense potential to truly improve the lives of millions of people by improving health literacy, increasing health connectivity, and ultimately, making healthcare a more friendly and accessible experience.