Opinion: The Apple Watch and its rivals are big with doctors

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Opinion: The Apple Watch and its rivals are big with doctors

By Florence Comite

Published: May 8, 2015 5:45 a.m. ET

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Wearable devices will form the backbone of ‘precision medicine’

Apple

The Apple Watch will eventually be able to do much more for medical patients and doctors.

At first glance, you might not be excited by the potential usefulness of the Apple Watch, but as a data-focused medical doctor, I see a bright future in wearable devices.

From a medical standpoint, Apple Inc.’s AAPL, +0.62%  watch is little more than a heartbeat and activity monitor. But developers are creating apps and tools to expand its capabilities.

I expect the Apple Watch and its competitors to be an important part of what is known as precision medicine — an individual approach to health that uses data from a person’s genome and biomarkers to understand and tailor treatments down to the cellular level.

Dr. Florence Comite

Dr. Florence Comite

Maybe the next generation of watches will come with biofeedback headsets. Or perhaps a stylus will be included that can touch the skin to provide an array of real-time medical data. It may even be possible for watches to include a pacemaker-like device that can spot atrial fibrillation and jump-start a heart to its proper rhythm.

How about an around-the-clock blood-pressure tracker or a carbon-monoxide sensor?

Someday, someone might even invent an app that takes a picture of food on a plate and analyzes it for calories and nutrition, or maybe even develop a tool that detects how effectively that meal is being digested.

Touted by President Obama in his State of the Union address in January, precision medicine is the combination of big data and health care. By looking at your genome and analyzing trends in biomarkers, such as blood, hormones, body mass and symptoms, physicians and researchers can drill down to see precisely what is happening in the body. This approach can identify both immediate developments and long-term trends.

The idea is to look at all of those factors and interrelationships, as well as your history and genetics, and come up with personal approaches to managing your health. We can look for risks decades in advance and change the trajectory of your health.

Precision medicine tends to attract people who are “self-quantifiers.” These technocrats believe we are on the verge of understanding our body and its operating system, right down to its source code, DNA. And what fun is code if it can’t be hacked? We want to hack our health.

I can easily imagine how the Apple Watch will allow these hacks by becoming the hub for data gathered by the so-called Internet of Things. A watch, after all, is an excellent device for data collection because it can passively collect inputs as it’s always connected to the body.

We are already at a point where our washing machines will start ordering our laundry soap when we run out. I can imagine a tomorrow where your pillow, your refrigerator, your treadmill and even your toilet all could capture health data and send it to your watch, from which it will be sent to the cloud.

Then, after the data are analyzed, warnings, suggestions and, perhaps someday, algorithmic diagnoses are flashed back to the watch. If a problem exists, maybe your Apple self-driving car rushes you to the hospital.

It is not difficult to imagine how close this reality might be. Last year, Apple created HealthKit and ResearchKit to help developers working in this area. And last month, Apple joined IBM’s IBM, +1.18%  new Watson Health Cloud, which will enable researchers to create technology to analyze patient data from wearable devices. Samsung, Johnson & Johnson JNJ, +0.20%  and Medtronic MDT, -0.37%  also have joined.

Of course, we will need gray matter as much as we need the machines. The human element is going to have to interpret that data in some way, perhaps for a long time. The permutations and combinations of genes alone make for a dizzying array of analyses, not unlike picking numbers for the lottery.

Indeed, one of the more complex aspects of precision medicine today is that biomarkers and genetic data need to be analyzed as a total data set, and we are still building our understanding of how factors interrelate. It requires a flesh-and-blood translator with wisdom. But, to some degree, we know that this analysis of complex data sets is something technology will do better than men and women — someday.

All this makes one wonder if, maybe, in the not-so-far-off future, the Internet and its related inventions will disrupt doctors the way they have affected so many other professions. Even as I view my new Apple Watch as a promising new intern, I’m aware that someday the student may surpass the teacher.

Florence Comite, M.D., is a Manhattan-based endocrinologist who graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine and trained at the National Institutes of Health. She is the author of “Keep It Up,” a book about the use of precision medicine in men’s health.

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