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The Apple iWatch Is Supposedly 11 Days Away. It's Already Overhyped.

This article is more than 9 years old.

Apple will launch its long-awaited iWatch on September 9, Re/code reported on Wednesday.

And a real, actual iWatch can't come soon enough: The iWatch hype cycle is out-of-control.

Thanks largely to anticipated iWatch sales, forecasting firm IDC projects that the wearable-computer market will explode to 19.2 million wearables sold in 2014, more than triple last year's sales. That's among the more conservative projections; Morgan Stanley suggests that Apple could sell up to 60 million iWatch units in the product's first year on the market.

Observers also are crowing over the iWatch's potential to "revolutionize" personal health care, given the device's probable pairing with Apple's new iPhone and HealthKit software.

Also See: Leaked Details About Apple's HealthKit Rollout

An iWatch, the thinking goes, would be able to continuously monitor a person's health and transmit the data to medical providers. And Apple has reportedly hired experts in sleep research, medical sensors, fitness, and lobbying the FDA.

"The iWatch will enable a quantification and personalization of healthcare delivery on a scale previously unimaginable," one Apple investor claims at SeekingAlpha.com.

"Health wearables will transform health care as we know it," a mobile technology executive argues on VentureBeat.

Sure — if the iWatch follows previous Apple rollouts, it will be phenomenally successful for the company. It'll establish a new product line for consumers. And there's good reason to be excited about the iWatch's broad promise as a device and specific potential to affect health care.

iWatch concept by Martin Hajek.

But let's let some air out of the iWatch bubble. Many tech firms have pledged to change health care, only to end up defeated by the industry's intricacies. And with less than two weeks to go, there's still a lot we don't know about Apple's newest product.

"The Apple 'iWatch' has been built up to mythical proportions," Lauren Goode writes for Re/code. "We don’t know if it exists in the form factors some have envisioned."

"We’re not even certain it will be called 'iWatch.'"

Focusing just on iWatch's implications for health care, here are three reasons to be wary of the new wearable.

1. The data isn't useful yet.

One of the biggest arguments in favor of wearable devices is that the technology will presumably capture and share relevant health data with doctors. (Apple's HealthKit, for example, is expected to send data collected by an iWatch directly into patients' EPIC health records.)

But for doctors, the existing data collected by wearable devices is more of a novelty than a need-to-have. Sure, tracking running routes and calories burned is useful for fitness buffs. That's not going to make much of a dent in doctors' ability to combat a patient's chronic illness, though.

Jawbone, which makes the UP fitness band, unwittingly provided an example after Sunday's earthquake shook Northern California. The company quickly released a data visualization on how Californians' sleep was interrupted by the earthquake.

While Jawbone's data on sleep patterns was intriguing — and interesting enough to write about — it's hard to see health care leaders or policymakers being able to do much with it.

2. The key technology probably doesn't exist yet.

One of the most buzz-worthy iWatch rumors was that Apple developers were working to devise a way to "listen" to blood flow and predict heart attacks.

It would be a fantastic achievement. And it would revolutionize cardiac care.

But ask yourself this: With the incredible financial opportunity in the health care sector, why hasn't a medical device company already pioneered this technology? Isn't it presumptuous to think a company best known for smartphones and stylish computers will succeed where dozens of others haven't?

And as Modern Healthcare's Darius Tahir smartly alludes to, big clinical breakthroughs require FDA approval and clinical trials ... which are impossible to keep secret. If the iWatch had a significant new biomedical feature, we would know about it by now.

To put it simply, iWatch's amazing potential will be constrained by bitter reality. Creating the desired technology — and squeezing it into a small wristwatch — is a heavy lift for any company. Let alone for a firm that's never brought a health care device to market.

For a more practical example, consider a hypothetical "killer app" for the iWatch: If the device could non-invasively measure blood glucose levels.

That would make the iWatch a must-own for diabetics — sparing them frequent and repeated pinpricks — and Apple's reportedly been hard at work developing this technology. But the emphasis in the last sentence should be on developing; while it's possible that Apple will wow the world next month, a watch-size continuous glucose monitor (CGM) would be a huge biomedical breakthrough.

"If we're to believe that an iWatch capable of non-invasive CGM is on the horizon," Yoni Heisler wrote at Network World earlier this year, "we're forced to make a number of lofty assumptions about Apple's ability to miniaturize the technology, vastly improve its battery life, and address ... [numerous] issues that make the device ill-suited as a mass market consumer product."

Heisler adds that many of Apple's top biomedical and medical hires are relatively recent hires. "Developing a bonafide medical breakthrough device in such a compressed timeframe runs against all notions of plausibility," he writes.

3. Consumers get weary of wearing a wearable.

Even if iWatch sales are brisk, getting customers — and especially the people who would most benefit from it — to commit to constantly wearing their devices will be a hard sell.

(See Connie Guglielmo's story for Forbes Magazine: The Case Against Wearables, Or Why We Won't All Look Like The Borg This Year.)

"One measure of a wearable device's success is whether you would turn around for it if you were halfway to work—as you would for a smartphone," The Economist noted this week. "Yet market research suggests that consumers are not willing to make an about-face and fetch their fitness trackers."

There's also research that indicates owning a smartwatch has, thusfar, been more of a fad than a trend. For instance, one-third of wearable-device owners stopped wearing them after six months.

Don't get me wrong: I'll watch the iWatch debut with great interest ... but with lowered expectations. In recent years, several prominent Silicon Valley firms have stormed into health care with grand plans, only to slink away when their ambitions failed.

If Apple wants its iWatch and HealthKit to transform the industry, the company can't just think different — they'll have to be different.

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