14 DAY TRIAL // Apple’s Watch has become one of the best-selling wearable devices on the market, pushing forward this side of the market and helping the Cupertino-based company improve its offering in an industry that’s continuously growing.
And while many believe that the Apple Watch is actually a product that does make sense for Apple because of the boom recorded by wearables, it appears that plans for this devices date back to the days when Steve Jobs was still at the helm of the company.
Time reveals that investing in the health sector was one of Steve Jobs’ main demands and the Apple Watch was developed to address the lack of devices that could help customers get quick stats about their health, including heart rate activity.
Jobs pushed for more investments in health at about the same time when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and the report claims that plans to develop the Apple Watch were accelerated when the former CEO discovered the problems of the American healthcare system.
One of the reasons the Apple Watch came to be was simply because Steve Jobs wanted to help improve customer health, the report says, but at the same time, he also directed the company towards a different approach that would eventually lead to significant achievements in the health industry.
Investing in platforms to empower developers build medical solutions
Apple launched HealthKit in 2014 as a framework targeting developers to create solutions that would work in connection with its own Health App. Furthermore, Apple’s investments in this area continued with the so-called ResearchKit, a stand-alone platform whose purpose was to help perform medical studies using Apple Watch data.
And earlier this year, Apple introduced its new CareKit health platform, a completely new effort whose purpose is to enable developers build solutions to monitor and report medical conditions.
It’s believed that the Apple Watch 2, which could land either in September together with the iPhone 7 or in early 2017, two years after the original model, would increase focus on health and come with new features specifically based on the aforementioned health platforms.
The company’s believed to invest in a secret health lab where it’s working with healthcare professionals for developing new ways to improve medical conditions with help from technology and results achieved from these investments could at some point make it on products such as iPhone and Apple Watch.