> That is the issue that should get resolved with time.

Bear in mind that this hasn't happened for the other major overdiagnosis issue (cancer screening), and the best solution found so far there is to screen less. This really isn't the sort of thing where natural technological progress is enough to be comfortable saying things like "it'll get resolved with time". There are already counterexamples to what you're saying, it's not a matter of an "adjustment period".

If I understand right, one of the problems in the case of cancer is that we don't have great data about the people without symptoms who wider screening would catch. Once we catch them, we treat them, and many recover. But to say how many of those would have been fine anyway, we'd have to know more about the un-screened rest of the population.

The hope with widespread cheap screening would be that it might avoid this. If heart-rate smartwatches become as common as smartphones, we could train our treatment model on everyone, and do better. Or at least this sounds mathematically plausible to me (not an expert).

Whether it will come to pass, or whether doctors will continue to treat as now (anything which an eyeball test says looks like an early stage of a known disease) I don't know.

Not when everyone is wearing one of these watches. That's the point behind one of the parent comments. The traditional way of looking at medical screening is that you only go looking for something if there is a rationale.

So, for a heart monitor, you'd only have the test run if you had another symptom, such as shortness of breath, an irregular heart beat, etc... Otherwise, you will end up with many more false positives, which can be dangerous in and of itself. What if someone who legitimately has a heart condition had an Apple watch and ran the test. But what if that person then ignored the watch because all of their friends tried the same thing, and went to the doctor only to find out it wasn't anything to worry about. Their false positives could have a real impact on someone who had a true positive result.

The more you test, the more you'll find. Now, it's perfectly possible that many of the subjects in this study bought the watch specifically because they suspected that they had a heart condition. In which case, the study pool could be skewed away from the general population.

There is no way to adjust for this. The more people you screen, the more you'll find. Whether or not it's a true positive or false positive is another question. And I'd argue that Apple would need to skew their reporting towards removing false negatives instead of removing false positives, just from a liability point of view. You're much more likely to see Apple sued over this than a typical medical device manufacturer.