bruce ketchum

bdkennedy said:

Tim Cook is the only person I know that can say paragraph after paragraph of words that give you very little information. It's a waste of my time reading it. "We have some great products in the pipeline." -- every year

I have to agree. The challenge: How do you share information - get people excited - without reducing your competitiveness. Tricky and risky marketing tactic.

I think of Apple's event invitations. The graphics and enigmatic message always get people guessing and excited. But the invitations never give anything away. Tim Cook might do well to message more excitement and mystery in his interviews.

GeorgeBMac said:

danvdr said:

Seems to me that blood oxygen will largely be a cool party trick. A) Unless you are quite sick, your O2 is normal. If you are quite sick and aren't getting enough O2 your body detects it and you feel short of breath and start breathing faster/harder. The O2 sensor gives you a number; whether you head to the doctor or not will depend on how you feel.

Now, if they could get an accurate blood glucose (i.e. blood sugar) monitor, I think that will be a game changer. (But that one is likely a ways off.)

An SpO2 sensor could, I suspect, be useful for endurance athletes.   It is a well accepted fact that high end endurance athletes (runners, cyclists, etc.) are rated on their VO2Max (the body's ability to take in and use Oxygen).  So, providing real time blood levels of oxygen during an event could provide additional useful data to those athletes over and above heart rate.

For myself, when I race, I look at heart rate most of all in order to pace myself by allowing it to climb from 80% of max up to 95-100% in a controlled manner.   I suspect that blood oxygen levels might be very useful to know in order to better pace myself during an event -- telling me how well my heart and lungs are supplying oxygen to my muscles.

In healthy people, arterial blood oxygen levels don't increase or decrease during physical activity. You might see a slight, momentary drop during a so-called supramaximal effort, but largely no change. Increased O2 delivery to active muscles is accomplished by increasing respiratory rate and increasing cardiac output (stroke volume x heart rate). Unless you have a disease or disorder, a single hemoglobin protein molecule picks up and drops off four oxygen molecules at the same rate always, no matter what state of activity you're in.