Apart from diagnosing heart issues, a future iteration of the Apple Watch could also be able to foretell if the users are susceptible to having diabetes as well.
Interestingly, the above is being brought about by the same company Cardiogram that currently is engaged in developing the technology that aims to predict if the users suffer from heart issues or is likely to have it shortly. The company said careful analysis of the same data they collected for studying heart conditions could also foretell if the person is likely to pick up diabetes as well in future.
Cardiogram explained the above is possible because both the pancreas and the heart are linked to the nervous system. Hence, any changes with one of the organ do have an impact on the other as well. Cardiogram said they analyzed more than 200 million bits of sensor data collected from 14,011 participants and found those to be able to differentiate people having diabetes from others with 85 percent success rate.
Cardiogram offers an app for both Apple Watch as well as Android Wear and uses a DeepHeart neural network to determine if a person has issues with the heart. The company has also teamed up with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco to devise a fool proof method of predicting heart ailments.
The company though is unable to tell exactly when it plans to integrate its DeepHeart neural network directly in the Cardiogram app. Once that is done, it no doubt will vastly enhance the appeal of a smartwatch that so far is seen as more of a luxury item with little practical usage.
However, Apple Watch has evolved over the years to incorporate advanced heart rate sensors that can detect atrial fibrillation, hypertension, or sleep apnea. Ability to detect if the person is likely to have diabetes as well, will no doubt be a boon given how widespread the disease has become in various parts of the world.
Future Apple Watch models might have built in EKG monitoring feature
Apart from Cardiogram, Apple too is engaged in a research of its own – Apple Heart Study – in collaboration with Stanford University to ensure the Apple Watch is able to accurately predict common heart ailments.
