Mr Huston in the last link is complaining that there were too many subjects in the test and that the test was pretty expensive for Apple. How am I to take this seriously? It’s just another Apple hater.
In regards to your observation, Husten’s review notes that the study [1] included subjects where the incidence and prevalence of atrial fibrillation (AF) is low [2], and given the study’s design flaws, its findings turned out to be largely irrelevant except as a marketing tool with relatively negligible costs for Apple [3].
I don’t know if Mr. Husten is an Apple hater, but it would be more interesting if you challenged his actual arguments including those in the study’s accompanying opinion piece: “The uncomfortable fact is that our personal health data have considerable financial value to those who want to use them in the myriad marketplaces connected to our $3.7 trillion health economy.” [4]
I’m not sure how the fact that data has value is a comment on Apple Health studies. The health data collected in these studies is not connected on contact information, so the only thing a user can be profiled as is as a person who participates in the study. The author is quick to dismiss this data that first was worth billions as worthless though.
> Now the same sort of breathless optimism about technology is infecting medicine and healthcare.
Clearly the author made up his mind before he even started.
> In other words, nearly half a million people were required to identify a few hundred people with AF.
Or, the study identified a few hundred people with AF, using nothing but the watch they were going to wear anyway. Impressive!
I don’t know if Mr. Husten is an Apple hater, but it would be more interesting if you challenged his actual arguments including those in the study’s accompanying opinion piece: “The uncomfortable fact is that our personal health data have considerable financial value to those who want to use them in the myriad marketplaces connected to our $3.7 trillion health economy.” [4]
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1901183
[2] https://www.ajconline.org/article/S0002-91491301288-5/fullte...
[3] http://www.cardiobrief.org/2019/11/13/what-can-we-learn-from...
[4] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1913980