by Dan Moren
Apple launches major new long-term health study
This new longitudinal, virtual study aims to understand how data from technology — including Apple and third-party devices — can be used to predict, detect, monitor, and manage changes in participants’ health. Additionally, researchers will explore connections across different areas of health. The study spans a number of health and disease areas, including activity, aging, cardiovascular health, circulatory health, cognition, hearing, menstrual health, mental health, metabolic health, mobility, neurologic health, respiratory health, sleep, and more.
One number Apple likes to toss around, especially during its quarterly financial calls, is “installed base”—the number of Apple devices out there. While it’s easy to dismiss that figure—now in the billions—as a mere boast, this is an example of how that can translate directly into capabilities that just aren’t achievable in other circumstances.
As Apple itself points out in its press release, a lot of health and scientific studies are limited by the number of subjects they can track or the amount of time for which they can be tracked, but by using devices that millions of people carry with them all the time, the possibilities expand greatly.
This is much broader and more open-ended than previous Apple health studies, which have been targeted on specific areas, such as hearing health and heart health. Those have resulted in features like the AirPods Pro hearing aid capabilities and the Apple Watch’s heart-monitoring functionality.
Of course, any technology that comes out of this study will be years if not potentially decades away—work of this kind often takes years, especially if there isn’t necessarily even a hypothesis of what data might be interesting. And, in the case that Apple does find interesting and actionable data, developing a feature based on it would probably take years to create, test, and roll out. But it’s a sign that Apple continues to invest heavily in health tech as one of its future directions, a decision that makes a lot of sense when you consider that people will always have health concerns.
Although this program has likely been in the works for some time, it’s also hard not to look at the announcement against the backdrop of recent weeks, in which medical and scientific funding have found themselves under assault. In a future where the U.S. government abdicates its responsibilities of exploring ways to improve the well-being of its citizens, it feels as though deep corporate pockets may be one of the few resources left for carrying out this kind of research—and despite what Apple has accomplished so far in this realm, that’s not exactly a situation I would describe as “reassuring.”