How Apple Watch saved my life: Elderly recounts saga in letter to Tim Cook

TECHNOLOGY NEWS - While digital technology often receives brickbats from the health-conscious, a 76-year-old man in Hong Kong now wants anyone with a heart problem to wear an Apple Watch after it helped him get a new lease of life by sending an alert about his elevated heart rate.

Gaston D'Aquino, a semi-retired diamond trader, was sitting in a church in April when he spotted an alarm on his timepiece telling him that his heart rate was too high, tech website Phone Arena reported on Sunday.

Although D'Aquino was feeling fine, he skipped Easter lunch with his family to go to the hospital.

That decision proved to be life-saving as a battery of tests performed on him later revealed that two of his three main coronary arteries were completely blocked, and the other was 90 per cent blocked, according to the report originally published by the South China Morning Post on Friday.

The doctors at the hospital lauded the Apple Watch for its accurate readings.

On the advice of the doctors, D'Aquino later had an angioplasty, in which tiny balloons are temporarily inserted into clogged arteries and inflated to open them.

Touchless gesture control, curved screens for future iPhones on cards

Apple Inc is working on touchless gesture control and curved screens for future iPhones, projects that may help the company differentiate its most-important product in an increasingly crowded market, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The control feature would let iPhone users perform some tasks by moving their finger close to the screen without actually tapping it. The technology likely won’t be ready for consumers for at least two years, if Apple chooses to go forward with it, a person familiar with the work said.


Apple has long embraced new ways for humans to interact with computers. Co-Founder Steve Jobs popularized the mouse in the early 1980s. Apple’s latest iPhones have a feature called 3D Touch that responds differently depending on different finger pressures. The new gesture technology would take into account the proximity of a finger to the screen, the person said.

Too late for Facebook to regulate itself, says Apple's Cook on data breach

Facebook should have had regulated itself long back but it's too late for that now, Apple CEO Tim Cook has reiterated.

In an interview with Recode and MSNBC scheduled to be aired on April 6, Cook also made a harsh rebuke of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others who use customer data to make revenues.

Cook said he would prefer that Facebook and others would have curbed their use of personal data to build "these detailed profiles of people... patched together from several sources".

"I think the best regulation is self-regulation. However, I think we're beyond that here," Cook said.

"The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetised our customer a" if our customer was our product. We've elected not to do that," the Apple CEO added.

On a question that what would he do if he were Zuckerberg, he said: "I wouldn't be in this situation."

With the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealing massive Facebook data misuse, Cook earlier called for more measures to ensure user data protection.

At the annual China Development Forum in Beijing, he said: "I think that this certain situation is so dire and has become so large that probably some well-crafted regulation is necessary".