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Apple’s CEO just hinted at a brand new medical product

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Apple CEO Tim Cook and model Christy Turlington at the Apple Watch launch event. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Buried in a story about iPads and the new Apple TV, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook hinted at a new medical product in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph.

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“We don’t want to put the watch through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process,” Cook said. “I wouldn’t mind putting something adjacent to the watch through it, but not the watch, because it would hold us back from innovating too much, the cycles are too long. But you can begin to envision other things that might be adjacent to it — maybe an app, maybe something else.”

Cook was talking about how he doesn’t want the Apple Watch to become a government-licensed health product that needs to be regulated, even though it does offer some health-related benefits thanks to its ability to count steps and measure exercise.

Apple already has several apps designed to help share important medical data between hospitals, health institutions and health insurance companies. Those apps live under the umbrella of Apple’s HealthKit software, which can help doctors collect more and better health data from their patients between visits for more efficient care.

Earlier this year, Apple also introduced ResearchKit, a new platform that aims to improve the communication between doctors and researchers. Since the Health and HealthKit apps can collect data about a person’s health, ResearchKit was designed to help companies build applications around specific diseases and conditions, like Parkinson’s, diabetes, asthma, and breast cancer. The idea is, patients with those conditions use these apps to provide doctors and researchers with more reliable data to further their own research.

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In Apple's ResearchKit app for Parkinson's disease, patients can tap two points repeatedly to test the magnitude of their tremors. This information will go on to help doctors and researchers. Screenshot

But a medical device, not an app, like the one Cook is referring to in the Telegraph interview sounds like something else entirely. Maybe it’s not just one tool, but a number of tools, to help collect meaningful data that can then plug into the iPhone’s Health applications. But nobody really knows — anything would be purely speculation at this point.

Personally, I hope Tim Cook is alluding to something I’ve wanted for a very long time: earbuds that can measure your health, and deliver that data to your phone.

One of Apple’s patent applications from 2007 proposes a set of headphones with “one or more integrated physiological sensors” that would help people keep track of their body stats. In the patent filing, you can see how a body sensor could clip onto one’s earlobe and thus transmit information about one’s pulse and oxygen levels — two things the current Apple Watch can’t do.

apple headphone patent
USPTO

A similar patent application from Apple the following year describes a system that can monitor these metrics and “facilitate sensing of other characteristics (e.g., biometric data), such as temperature, perspiration, and heart rate.”

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The science is there: Physicians have, for a long time, tried to build similar in-ear monitoring systems that can inform doctors about cardiovascular risk factors. Researchers actually believe the ear is the “[ideal] location for an integrated wearable vital signs monitor… for both physiological and mechanical reasons.”

It’s possible the only thing that’s held back a medical device of this nature is fashion. For a device like this to be useful, it needs to be worn, but doctors aren’t design experts. Apple, on the other hand, is. What better way to popularize “getting healthy” than to make a medical device into a stylish product?

Also, Cook mentions the FDA “cycles are too long.” That wouldn’t affect something like health-focused earbuds all that much, since these aren’t products that are regularly updated like iPhones and iPads. Apple’s current earbuds design hasn’t changed since 2012, and before that, its design went unchanged for 12 full years.

Of course, this is all conjecture. It’s possible Apple could release a completely separate medical tool, or none at all. But Apple pushing further into the medical industry is something that’s desperately needed. Many doctors and experts believe the US health care system needs drastic reform, and if nothing else, Apple’s products could help expose the remaining barriers and inefficiencies that stand between doctors and those that need care.

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