Not when everyone is wearing one of these watches. That's the point behind one of the parent comments. The traditional way of looking at medical screening is that you only go looking for something if there is a rationale.
So, for a heart monitor, you'd only have the test run if you had another symptom, such as shortness of breath, an irregular heart beat, etc... Otherwise, you will end up with many more false positives, which can be dangerous in and of itself. What if someone who legitimately has a heart condition had an Apple watch and ran the test. But what if that person then ignored the watch because all of their friends tried the same thing, and went to the doctor only to find out it wasn't anything to worry about. Their false positives could have a real impact on someone who had a true positive result.
The more you test, the more you'll find. Now, it's perfectly possible that many of the subjects in this study bought the watch specifically because they suspected that they had a heart condition. In which case, the study pool could be skewed away from the general population.
There is no way to adjust for this. The more people you screen, the more you'll find. Whether or not it's a true positive or false positive is another question. And I'd argue that Apple would need to skew their reporting towards removing false negatives instead of removing false positives, just from a liability point of view. You're much more likely to see Apple sued over this than a typical medical device manufacturer.
So, for a heart monitor, you'd only have the test run if you had another symptom, such as shortness of breath, an irregular heart beat, etc... Otherwise, you will end up with many more false positives, which can be dangerous in and of itself. What if someone who legitimately has a heart condition had an Apple watch and ran the test. But what if that person then ignored the watch because all of their friends tried the same thing, and went to the doctor only to find out it wasn't anything to worry about. Their false positives could have a real impact on someone who had a true positive result.
The more you test, the more you'll find. Now, it's perfectly possible that many of the subjects in this study bought the watch specifically because they suspected that they had a heart condition. In which case, the study pool could be skewed away from the general population.
There is no way to adjust for this. The more people you screen, the more you'll find. Whether or not it's a true positive or false positive is another question. And I'd argue that Apple would need to skew their reporting towards removing false negatives instead of removing false positives, just from a liability point of view. You're much more likely to see Apple sued over this than a typical medical device manufacturer.