There's a lot of technical problems to doing this. We're still not great at getting heart rate or blood oxygen. Sure, you get a decent reading but that's with lots of averaging and the temporal resolution is decently low. Just because it's hard to maintain a good monitoring position when active let alone adjusting for things like skin tone/optical transparency.
Totally agree, the limitations here aren’t technical, they are regulatory. The barrier to entry for medical devices (FDA approval) is so incredibly high it greatly slows down development on health related devices. Apple has an entire team dedicated to regulatory stuff for the one tiny health feature they offer on the Apple Watch.
It may slow it down, but for good reason: it's outright dangerous to sell someone a device you claim to help monitor their health that does no such thing. Even worse, selling people's private health details (as sketchy as they may be) to whoever wants, or just making them public for hackers, is a much bigger detriment than any tech on the horizon can bring as a positive.
There are large interpersonal physiological differences due to so many variables that it makes getting high accuracy with machine learning models hard. Only way I see this accuracy improving is by calibrating those models with good reference data for individuals.
> But medically speaking, smartwatches are probably decades away from independently diagnosing anything
But it's because we won't do it. There's nothing technical or hard to make this right.
I don't believe it's hard to pick up a heart attack using a wearable. But I don't think many heart attacks are picked up with wearables.
Record everything, if something is different see a doctor should both meet this requirement and be highly beneficial.
A smartwatch will just communicate. That could be to an online database or a person.
If the intent is around privacy and no doctor or external thing is ever consulted and not recommended to be consulted. Then, yes it's decades away.