Originally by Brian Leavitt on September 21, 2019
With the growth of wearable technology has come a tsunami of tracking and analytics devices and apps. With the help of smart phones, smart watches, smart earbuds, etc., people are now regularly tracking all aspects of their sleep, their health, and their day-to-day lives. One question that is not yet being regularly asked is if this is a net benefit or a net negative? What is useful and beneficial to track, and what is useless, or actually harmful?
The Apple Watch has recently gained an EKG feature to detect irregular heart rhythms and a Noise app to prevent hearing loss. The question I have is is this a net benefit? As a company, Apple will obviously market any new feature as a major benefit, and anything health related typically sells well. Apple has marketed the EKG and heart rate detection features heavily, relating anecdotes where people’s lives have been saved by the detection features of the watch. What are the percentage of people who suffer from a condition that the Apple Watch could prevent with the EKG and Noise apps? What will the percentage of people who experience worry and unnecessary medical exams from false positives be? At what point are we tracking too much?
I’ve never had a concern about my heart or a concern about hearing loss, but I have an Apple Watch, so maybe I will develop concerns soon.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT209593
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT209593
As the world moves towards a new definition of normal, I think that the questions raised in the post will become more and more important. A great example of this is contact tracing apps.
“Contact tracing — the practice of tracking people who may have come in contact with an infected person in order to get them tested and isolated — is widely viewed as vital to a country’s pandemic recovery.” https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-app-contact-tracing-1.5580184
It is remarkable seeing tech giants Apple and Google working in collaboration to release technology that will notify people if they have come into contact with an infected individual (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-app-contact-tracing-1.5580184), but what will be the repercussions to our population when it comes to our privacy? Will apps that track your daily vitals promote a sense of calmness or push anxiety to higher levels as people start to see statistics about their temperature on a daily, if not hourly, basis? What will happen to all that data? It is always a fine line walked when it comes to tracking people’s information; this pandemic has put the world into new and uncharted waters and I firmly believe we need to examine both the costs and benefits to any technology used for tracking our data, regardless if it is being promoted “for our own good”.