Steve Jobs’ healthcare experiences said to have inspired the Apple Watch
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A new report dives into one of Apple's focus on healthcare and the impact that work has had on the Apple Watch. Apparently, one of the key motivations behind the company's health initiatives and its efforts with the watch were the experience of late CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs as he traversed the U.S. healthcare system while treating his pancreatic cancer.
Jobs found the system to be a mess, and set about the task of connecting patients, their data, and their doctors. From Tim Bajarin, reporting for TIME:
It is within this backdrop that the Apple Watch was born. Apparently, Apple was looking at ways to deliver on Jobs' goal of making their customers healthier by using technology to help monitor and track health related data points. It became clear to them that they would need some type of mobile device platform to do this. They concluded that a standard fitness tracker couldn't do the types of things Jobs and current Apple executives really wanted to see. That's how the Apple Watch came about.
Outside of the Apple Watch, Apple has in recent years put more of an emphasis on health, particularly through the iPhone. The company added a Health app with iOS 8 to aggregate health data from the various apps around your phone. The company also launched ResearchKit and CareKit, open source platforms that allow developers to build apps that gather specific health data.