The world's most valuable company crammed a lot into the tablespoon-sized volume of an Apple Watch. There's GPS, a heart-rate sensor, cellular connectivity, and computing resources that not long ago would have filled a desk-dwelling beige box. The wonder gadget doesn't have a sphygmomanometer for measuring blood pressure or polysomnographic equipment found in a sleep lab--but thanks to machine learning, it might be able to help with their work. Research presented at the American Heart Association meeting in Anaheim Monday claims that, when paired with the right machine-learning algorithms, the Apple Watch's heart-rate sensor and step counter can make a fair prediction of whether a person has high blood pressure or sleep apnea, in which breathing stops and starts repeatedly through the night. Both are common--and commonly undiagnosed--conditions associated with life-threatening problems, including stroke and heart attack.

The world's most valuable company crammed a lot into the tablespoon-sized volume of an Apple Watch. There's GPS, a heart-rate sensor, cellular connectivity, and computing resources that not long ago would have filled a desk-dwelling beige box. The wonder gadget doesn't have a sphygmomanometer for measuring blood pressure or polysomnographic equipment found in a sleep lab--but thanks to machine learning, it might be able to help with their work. Research presented at the American Heart Association meeting in Anaheim Monday claims that when paired with the right machine-learning algorithms, the Apple Watch's heart-rate sensor and step counter can make a fair prediction of whether a person has high blood pressure, or sleep apnea, in which breathing stops and starts repeatedly through the night. Both are common--and commonly undiagnosed--conditions associated with life-threatening problems, including stroke and heart attack.

There was a time when doctors made house calls. That time is coming again, except now your doctor will be able to make 100 at once, while performing surgery at the same time. Dr. Leslie Saxon's USC Center for Body Computing and USC's Virtual Care Clinic leverage commercial tech innovations to advance medical care and delivery. "First thing we have to do is take your picture," says Dr. Leslie Saxon, Founder and Director of USC's Center for Body Computing, as she enthusiastically greets me at the Playa Vista campus location of the recently opened Virtual Care Clinic. I'm here to learn about the still nascent yet rapidly expanding field of digital medicine, and Dr. Saxon wants to show me what the face of the medical future that she envisions will look like--it turns out, just like an actual face, in fact.

While several startups have experimented with virtual doctor and nurse avatars, at the Center for Body Computing (CBC) at USC, researchers are taking the idea one step further. "That's the virtual me," Saxon said on-stage at BIO 2016 in San Francisco, indicating an image of her avatar. "You see virtual characters all the time, but they're very expensive. It's 3 million to create Kevin Spacey or a football player. We have a way of prototyping me that takes 30 seconds and can animate gestures and voice recognition. Saxon showed a video in which a hypertension patient takes home an app with Saxon's animated likeness. The virtual Saxon informs the patient of exactly why the new hypertension drug Saxon prescribed is a better, safer option for patients in his demographic. "In that scenario I had recommended the patient use a new blood thinner versus the blood thinner he's on," Saxon explained. "The data we presented, he couldn't get anywhere on the open market, not on Google, not anywhere because that tells him exactly his data and risk of benefiting, his major outcomes.