IBM's Watson Can't Make Apple Watch Any Smarter
Imagine: You’ve been trying to keep your cholesterol low, but constant business travel means too many fast food meals and not enough exercise. What if you received recommendations on healthier restaurants nearby—from your watch? And, what if that watch also encouraged you to take a 20-minute walk? Or what if it realized that you actually hate walks and would rather take a yoga class around the block that starts at 7 p.m.?
This may be the future of better health, at least if IBM’s Watson has its way. The cognitive computing wunderkind, known for its winning turn on Jeopardy!, is pairing its artificial intelligence with the mobile sensing power of Apple’s smartwatch…to create a health platform that can interact and adapt to each individual user. It’s the first time Watson’s super computing power will be used with the Apple Watch to transform how people manage their wellbeing. It all happens within an app called CaféWell Concierge, Powered by Watson. …
The mission behind the app is to create sustainable behavioral change for a user, especially those who are managing a chronic condition. A smart app on a smart watch on one’s wrist may be better at prompting important behaviors that could, ultimately, keep someone healthy and out of the doctor’s office or hospital. It could be as simple and benign as reminding someone to get a flu shot while walking by a retail pharmacy to something as serious as remembering to take a vital medication at a certain time.
“It’s about empowering patients,” said Kyu Rhee, chief health officer at IBM. “Doctors only have a few hours with patients in any given year. But, by empowering people with information outside the doctor’s office, we can nudge them—right on their wrists—towards better behaviors.”
Sigh.
Check the source, and you’ll find that — while there’s talk of Apple Watch’s “sensors,” there’s absolutely nothing that validates CaféWell Concierge as particularly necessary on the wrist. Nothing it’s reported to do requires a wearable experience. Your iPhone can alert you to an upcoming flu shot or set a yoga alarm in lieu of a trip around the neighborhood just as well as your Apple Watch will. Such blatant smartphone redundancy — and that’s all this is — is not the future of Apple’s deep health impact. I mean, the service is already available as a beta in your web browser, for crying out loud.
As long as every developer’s vision for Apple Watch is “redundant companion,” wearing the thing renders it the same thing.