Apple Watch: Happy 10th Birthday!

John Reites reflects on the 10th anniversary of the Apple Watch, discussing its evolution from a simple digital watch to a significant health monitoring device. He highlights its impact on society, particularly in promoting health awareness and its applications in clinical research. Reites shares various use cases of the Apple Watch in clinical settings, including its role as a patient support tool, a pharmacovigilance tool, and its ability to track patient activity levels, showcasing the transformative power of wearable technology in healthcare.

Thank you for joining Inclusion Criteria: a Clinical Research podcast hosted by me, John Reites. This is an inclusive, non-corporate podcast focused on the people and topics that matter to developing treatments for everyone. It’s my personal project intended to support you in your career, connect with industry experts and contribute to the ideas that advance clinical research.

Inclusion Criteria is the clinical research podcast exploring global clinical trials, drug development, and life‑science innovation. We cover everything clinical research to deepen your industry knowledge, further your career and help you stay current on the market responsible for the future of medicine.

Our episodes discuss current industry headlines, career tips, trending topics, lessons learned, and candid conversations with clinical research experts working to impact our industry everyday.

Watch on YouTube and listen on your favorite podcast app. Thank you for supporting and sharing the show.

Please connect with me (John Reites) at www.linkedin.com/in/johnreites or www.johnreites.com.

The views and opinions expressed by John Reites and guests are provided for informational purposes only. Nothing discussed constitutes medical, legal, regulatory, or financial advice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Happy 10th birthday Apple Watch. I remember my first Apple Watch. You know, everyone used to call it the iWatch, if you remember that. I'm sure that drove Apple nuts. This is actually my first watch. It came in this white case felt lining. And then the watch itself was, you know, mine was silver, very heavy, right? The, the initial design, a number of sensors, most that weren't turned on at the time, USB charging, you know, pretty practical, straightforward device. And I remember we would put it on our wrist and we really thought this was a lighter version of our phone. And that's really what this was going to be. Little did we know 10 years later, the kind of impact that the Apple watch would have, you know, it took one of the most standard things that people had, which were watches. This is one of my favorite G-Shocks, and I do wear real watches a lot. But it took this idea of a watch and replaced it with a digital health device that people will wear every day. To see people who grew up and who always wore a watch trade that out and just stick with an Apple Watch for years to come is pretty incredible. And if you look at 280 plus million watches sold, you know that the Apple Watch has made an impact in society. And I'll never forget, you know, one of the biggest impacts I noticed, you know, very early on as I'm in a meeting, there's about, you know, 20 or so people in this session all sitting around a big table. In that session are a bunch of nerds and other people, you know, like me that wanted to have the first version of the Apple Watch. And about halfway through the meeting, seven people just stand up. And they stood up because if you remember, there was an app that would tell you and remind you it's time to stand up. You've been sitting too long. You know, everybody's was synced. And so the reality is all these people stood up and you kind of realized two things. One is it was ridiculous that seven people were standing up in this meeting. But the other end is you were realizing the kind of impact and influence that this digital health device had on people that I would read the app. It would say time to stand up and I would just do it. And if you fast forward from there, you know that the Apple Watch has had really an impact, not Not just in the broader ecosystem, not just the broader economy that we have, but it would also impact clinical research and clinical trials. And since the first clinical research studies using Apple Watch were started with us in 2016, I've seen Apple Watch get used as both an exploratory and a secondary endpoint. but also as a patient support tool. And so I just wanted to quickly tell you about four of my top favorite use cases, because I really do think it helps to see the progressive use and the application of Apple Watch that actually can be helpful for patients, sites, and research data at large. And so the first one was, you know, using Apple Watch as a patient support tool that would rapidly capture seizure aura. So somebody has an aura, they believe a seizure's coming on. They didn't have to hold out their phone, open it, in their PIN code and do something, they could literally just click the hot button on their Apple Watch and it would have one click that they could click into a survey. And once they clicked it, they would say, I feel the aura. And that would trigger a progressive state of data capture, but would also log that really important piece of data for a clinical trial. The second use case I think is really interesting has been using Apple Watch as a pharmacovigilance tool. So we had one study where patients would have a particular event. That particular event, we wanted to capture right as it was starting, but actually we want to capture as it was starting to get a call center to call the patient and to talk to them and make sure they didn't need any other support or care, but also capture some data about that event. And so very similar to the previous use case, the Apple Watch was there. And so when this event happened, They would click the hot button, open up the app on their Apple Watch. And as soon as they said yes to that first survey, so again, two clicks, data would be captured. It would send a notification to a call center. The call center would directly call the patient and check in with them. So this kind of pharmacovigilance workflow became really practical and really easy because it was just always on the patient's wrist. Now, the third use case I think is interesting is we've had a number of studies like registries and other observational programs where exercise or movement or activity It was something that we wanted to look at additional endpoints for, just sort of assess the data. And so allowing what's called a data donation model to be present ended up being pretty impactful. And so what was really cool was that we would ask patients in the consenting process if they wanted to donate their Apple Watch data to the registry for X, Y, and Z use cases. And you'd actually be shocked at how many patients would be totally fine with that and would select specifically what data they wanted to offer or donate to the study. And then that data could be coupled with the other ECOA and other data that was being captured in the study. And then the fourth use case, we had an oncology study where an Apple watch was really helpful because patients were having a post dose period where their activity levels were very, very low. And we wanted to make sure that the patients were moving and we wanted to track that. And we wanted to actually assess how much movement was happening between this visit two and this visit three. So the ability to have the Apple watch there to track overall activity of how patients were moving around in their home for that seven day period between visit two and visit three became really important, but also not a big burden to patients who just had to wear the watch and charge it. And then the data would automatically be uploaded and provided to the researchers. So again, lots of use case for Apple Watch, lots of impact and history over the last 10 years. The Apple Watch has really been instructive, but it's also been really impactful to the world of digital health and its history. So happy birthday, Apple Watch.