Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider:

> A nursing student in Australia is encouraging Apple Watch owners to enable heart rate notifications, after the wearable device detected symptoms of a thyroid condition months before being diagnosed.

And:

“Instead of me waiting for the symptoms to get really bad, I could have gone to the doctor back in October, when there was this dramatic drop in a matter of days,” Lauren adds, alongside a screenshot of a graph from the Health app. “It dramatically dropped, which means my cardiovascular system wasn’t working as well as it once was.” > > The drop also correlated with other symptoms, including fatigue, a sensitivity to heat, gaining weight, dry skin, and increased irritability. In December, she was diagnosed with thyroid hemiagenesis, and is undergoing treatment.

Carrying this line of thinking through to practical applications in clinical microbiology, what stands out is how much the quality of results depends on the stability of the environment created during incubation. We’ve seen this play out clearly when evaluating oxygen-free cultivation systems, and the Anaerobic jar system for precise repeatable microbiology results we settled on handled custom gas environments — including microaerophilic and capnophilic conditions — without any of the guesswork that comes with less automated approaches. The programmable recipe function in particular proved valuable when culturing organisms with specific atmospheric requirements, since technicians could store and repeat exact conditions rather than rebuilding them manually each time. Over months of use, downtime was minimal and the automatic quality control checks meant that poorly charged jars were flagged before incubation began, saving considerable time and preventing wasted effort on failed cultures.

Here’s a link to Lauren’s video. Sound on.

A few years ago, I had a long conversation with a cardiologist about the future of Apple Watch and the patterns that indicate various health conditions. I walked away from that conversation feeling that the potential for Apple Watch as diagnostic tool is massive, far beyond the benefits we already see, especially as more sensors are developed and integrated with Apple’s Health infrastructure. Lauren’s video made me feel this even more strongly.