Apple’s event is wrapping up and they have announced the Apple Watch — their foray into the wearable market.
Here is what we learned:
1) Tim Cook is very adamant that the Apple Watch will be a comprehensive health and fitness device. He stated this multiple times throughout the presentation of the Watch, stating fitness and health was something personal to him.
2) The Apple Watch will use LEDs to measure your heart rate. They stated you could measure the “intensity” of your workouts with this sensor.
3) There will be two apps for the Apple Watch dedicated to health tracking and fitness: Fitness and Workout. The core of the watch will be a feature to promote healthy living: “Stand” / “Move” / and “Exercise” (below picture).
The Stand function will help minimize your sedentary time. The Move function will help you track how many calories you are burning throughout the day with standard activity — and encourage you to do so. The Exercise function can be used during intense workouts.
4) In my opinion the most important feature will be the integration into the iPhone’s Health app. I detailed why this would be important earlier in the day as this information has the potential to be utilized by health care professionals when it’s placed into patient records (via the relationship Apple is cultivating with Epic).
I’ll be honest. I wasn’t expecting this much from Apple’s first Watch. I figured there would be an accelerometer and some basic fitness tracking, but this is so much more.
The Apple Watch has fitness and health tracking built into the core of the functionality — and just based on the demonstration by Apple, supplants every single fitness tracking wearable on the market right now.
Make sure to check out the Live Blog of the health announcements by Apple that we did earlier in the day.
