Will Apple's iWatch be your friend?

Have been thinking about wearables since GSMA World in Barcelona this February and with the launch of Apple's iWatch I have started to formalise my opinions.

Setting aside the questions of does the device look suitable to take a place on my wrist the biggest question is what does an iWatch offer that I don't get from my handset?

The majority of Optimists tell me that if offers the opportunity to open a wide range of health benefits thanks to the App developer ecosytem taking the lifeloging data and improving what I do day to day.  I have looked at eHealth for quite some time and on the whole the processes that have been designed to make medicine better via technology have failed because of the silo nature of the stake holders. What has happened is that the increased data available has been used by the Insurance industry to raise premiums and or decline treatments.

Given what we have seen about breaches in data security by technology firms I do not hold out any hope that my data in anonymised given that the registration/purchasing functions used by Apple. Given that my working life requires long periods sat down and limited opportunities to exercise it would not be a surprise if the Actuary placed me in a high risk group and incentivised changes by financial penalties. Why should I make it easy for them by fitting a monitoring device that records how poor my time is used when it comes to health?

If I want to improve I think that I would invest in a Polar HRM system for the periods of the week when I am active and record the results in a Notebook rather than online rather than strap on an iWatch and give away health data.