Apple Watch is now socialized medicine, cue the sleep tracking feature leak
Apple Watch is now subsidized by a Medicare Advantage plan
We are thrilled to be the first Medicare Advantage plan to collaborate with Apple, and give our members the chance to use their Devoted Health Wellness bucks towards purchasing an Apple Watch. Using innovative technologies to improve the quality of care is core to our mission.
Needless to say, this may seem like an insignificant event, but is in fact a huge breakthrough into the $18 billion healthcare market in the US for Apple. It has been talking with insurers behind the scenes to acknowledge and subsidize the Watch as a personal health device for a while now, and the results are starting to get visible.
Apple Watch as a sleep tracker
The company won’t be resting on its laurels, too, as a rare glimpse into Apple’s future plans for its Watch came by none other than the official Alarms app for the wearable. The app’s screenshot in the App Store included a reference to a new Sleep app, as you can see below, until yesterday when Apple replaced the screenshot with a new one, cleared of the reference.
We’ve been hearing that Apple is prepping to turn the Watch into a sleep tracker, on top of all other things, and this is a tangential proof that it might be putting the same rigorous research and statistical approach it did when it developed the ECG function.
There are plenty of sleep trackers out there, but if one is rolled into the Apple Watch, it could soon become the most widely used pattern device out there given the ubiquitous nature of Apple’s wearable. Moreover, it will help Apple catapult the Watch as an indispensable health and fitness accessory, raising its profile even further. If we could only get more than a day or two of battery out of the Watch, too, that would be swell, Apple.