Spend a few minutes on Indiegogo and you'll come across a series of extraordinarily ambitious wearabledevicespromising to detect everything from your sleep patterns, to your stress levels, to the number ofcalories you've burnedin the past hour.
They've incited plenty of skepticism and the latest report from theWall Street Journalshows why: the Apple Watch was initially intended as exactly that sort of multifunctional health-monitoring device, but the sensors available just weren't good enough.
Heart activity, blood pressure, and stress levels were among the things Apple wanted to track with the Watch, however issues of complexity and reliability — such as getting accurate readings on users with hairy arms or dry skin — forced Apple into changingits plans.The four-year Watch project was a"black hole" that sucked in resourcesThat's not to say that the iPhone maker didn't try its hardest, with theWSJ's sources describing the four-year Watch project as a "black hole" that suckedin resources from elsewhere in the company.
But in the end, not even the most advanced sensor technology that Apple could obtain or design was good enough to perform all those sophisticated health-monitoring functions.
Additional regulatory issues could also arise if Apple were to try and interpret its data to suggest health advice, and all of these issues combined have compounded to produce the much more conventional Watch that is set to be released in April.Still, features like measuring blood oxygen levels andblood pressure are said to only have been shelved at Apple, and subsequent iterations of its Watch are likely to progress closer to the original vision of a multifunctional health monitoring device.
As of right now, the technology isn't advanced enough to match the ambition — not for Apple and even more certainly not for all those pie-in-the-sky Indiegogo ventures.
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