[Sociam-soton] Fwd: Re: Microsoft health

[electronic Max]

Oops, Google Inbox seems to be unable to keep my multiple e-mail addresses
straight. #beta

Forwarding my somewhat sarcastic response. If my understanding is wrong
please lmk.  Am also keen to hear about the ToS for MS Health(Vault)

Best,
Max

++

Sociam-soton has become a slow version of hacker news / reddit. :)

MS tries to play catchup again..  am unimpressed so far; not only is the
Band insanely clunky but all the sensing modalities are bog-standard. Very
sad to see no genuine innovation that MS could bring to the table - like
Kinect or gyro- based activity recognition for example.  And many of its
functions (despite being "cross platform") require a Windows Phone.
Unsurprising..

So far it's "let's feebly try to catch up with iWatch".  A diff on features
at the surface level introduces two new things in the Band that are seen as
core features (when I think they're already assumed for the iWatch) are
Guided Workouts and "UV index".  But what's puzzling is that Apple
introduced the iWatch as a smartphone platform (just like the iPhone) where
anyone can write apps that use its affordances - so ofc a UV index app that
feeds off of weather would be a no-brainer.  On the other hand, there is
absolutely no mention of the Band being a "platform" as far as I can see,
so I would guess that the Band is NOT open to developers.

In the advert for Microsoft Band, they said "Only Microsoft has the Machine
Learning expertise to make you more productive". What?? Yes there are some
ML gurus at MSR, but since when is this a sell point? ML should be
invisible and seamless not a bullet point on some salesperson's roster. I
think they're trying to up their "Intelligence Engine" :

"Over time, you will have the choice to combine your fitness data with
calendar and email information from Office as well as location-based
information and more. As you make more data available, the Intelligence
Engine will get smarter and provide more powerful insights, such as: Fitness
performance relative to work schedule, Whether eating breakfast helps you
run faster, If the number of meetings during the day impacts sleep quality."

Sounds like a pre-baked and unchangeable version of Bentley's Motorola
experiments that simply performed cross-modality correaltion....

Price point difference : Band is $199. iWatch starts at $399 and goes up up
and up. But the difference is WatchKit -- iWatch is a platform, not a
gadget.

Max

On Fri Oct 31 2014 at 7:19:54 AM Darren Richardson <dpr1g09 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Fitbit also announced a new range of trackers this week. The one that
> caught my attention was the Charge HR, which does continuous heart rate
> monitoring all day, every day.
>
> It'd be interesting to know what additional steps (ha ha) they've taken to
> protect that data, which is almost certainly a whole lot more sensitive
> than the data they've been collecting up to now. Depending on the
> resolution and accuracy, that long-term data could be invaluable for the
> purposes of medical diagnosis.
>
> I'd need to look a lot more closely at their API, privacy policy, and TOS
> (not necessarily in that order) before I could be convinced to wear one,
> which is a shame, because part of me really wants that data.
>
> Darren..
>
> > On 31 Oct 2014, at 01:26, Laura Dragan <lcd at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > And their "band" looks good too, feature-wise:
> >
> > http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/microsoft-band-is-a-windows-phon
> e-fitness-tracker-that-works-with-android-and-iphone-too/
> >
> >
> >> On 10/31/2014 12:50 AM, Tinati R. wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> Most of you are probably already aware of this, bit just incase you
> haven't heard, Microsoft have just released their health platform:
> >>
> >> http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/10/29/introducing-micro
> soft-health/
> >>
> >> Ramine
> >>
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> >
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