> "Computerized health monitors built into watches, jewelry, and clothing which diagnose both acute and chronic health conditions are widely used. In addition to diagnosis, these monitors provide a range of remedial recommendations and interventions."
> MOSTLY RIGHT
I'll quibble with this one and call it mostly wrong. Yes, a very narrow and specific set of possible cardiac abnormalities can be detected (with significant error rates) by the Apple Watch's optical (PPG) and electric (ECG) heart rate sensors. Other vendors have functionally equivalent capabilities.
But medically speaking, smartwatches are probably decades away from independently diagnosing anything, let along recommending an intervention (i.e. a drug or surgery). Kurzweil's terms have specific meanings in medicine and current technology is nowhere close to that.
What exists today (or, in 2019) is a very narrow use case and far from the broad and general scenario Kurzweil envisioned. And there is no realistic roadmap to achieve any more than incremental development in this area - PPG and ECG were "low-hanging fruit" in some sense, and medically actionable wearable sensors for pretty much any other medical signal present orders of magnitude larger engineering challenges that few people are even seriously working on. Hence, "mostly wrong."
> MOSTLY RIGHT
I'll quibble with this one and call it mostly wrong. Yes, a very narrow and specific set of possible cardiac abnormalities can be detected (with significant error rates) by the Apple Watch's optical (PPG) and electric (ECG) heart rate sensors. Other vendors have functionally equivalent capabilities.
But medically speaking, smartwatches are probably decades away from independently diagnosing anything, let along recommending an intervention (i.e. a drug or surgery). Kurzweil's terms have specific meanings in medicine and current technology is nowhere close to that.
What exists today (or, in 2019) is a very narrow use case and far from the broad and general scenario Kurzweil envisioned. And there is no realistic roadmap to achieve any more than incremental development in this area - PPG and ECG were "low-hanging fruit" in some sense, and medically actionable wearable sensors for pretty much any other medical signal present orders of magnitude larger engineering challenges that few people are even seriously working on. Hence, "mostly wrong."