Design a product to make using Apple devices safer for its users.

Before we build a product, we need to narrow the scope of the question.  Safer could mean a number of different things.  Do we mean

1.  Physical safety
   1.  weather events
   2. Interpersonal harm, muggings, stalking, dangerous situations
2.  Information safety
   1. Credit card information security
   2. Account security
   3. Personal information like DOB / Social security / place of residence

Both would be reasonable problems to try to solve.  When we consider the things already in place for physical safety, and information safety, and think about existing apple users, many of those users already have access to a suite of tools to protect information safety. Things like password managers, and settings to control data privacy.  Apple users are vastly spread out across the world, and are exposed to radically different standards of physical safety.  For that reason, I'm inclined to tackle the physical safety side of this question.  If we can build a tool to increase the physical safety of our users, it could have a massive impact and literally save lives.  

So when we think about physical safety, let's look at some groups of individuals, and some risks associated.  I'll list out some user groups first, then some risks associated below them, then we can compare the opportunity size across them.

1. Young kids
   1. SIDS - sudden infant death syndrome
   2. Choking risks
   3. drowning
   4. head impacts
2. teenagers through college students
   1. car accidents from lack of awareness
   2. car accidents from driving under the influence
   3. disease - lower impact here, higher risk in lower economic status parts of the world
   4. drug OD
   5. Natural disasters. Hurracaine / tornado / earthquake / landslide
3. middle aged adults
   1. car acccidents from lack of awareness
   2. car accidents from driving under the influence
   3. Diseases going unnoticed / undiagnosed until its too late
   4. Natural disasters. Hurracaine / tornado / earthquake / landslide
4. Elderly people
   1. Disease 
   2. Falling

So that gives us a really big list of risks we could try to solve. A couple that stand out to me are car accidents both from lack of awareness and driving under the influence, because that shows up in multiple user categories, and diseases / falling.  I group diseases and falling together, because both could potentially be improved by features added to wearables.

So before I even exactly pick between those two options, I'd like to brainstorm some options of features and products, and see where we land from that list, because I think there's going to be some significant crossover.

My basic idea is an app that can work from both mobile and wearable that tracks health and wellness data, and gives alerts when it senses things that could be wrong.  Here's a brainstorm of some features:

1. Feature Brainstorm
   1. Gyroscopic tracking of gait for balance and coordination issues - phones have motion detectors in them. This means we could use those trackers and sense when a person's gait (their ability to walk) is impaired.  This would actually have 2 big benefits! 
      1.  First, it could be an alert and a warning for driving under the influence.  If you're too drunk to drive, the phone can sound an alert. 
      2. Second it could alert elderly people or their caregivers when there is a falling risk. As elederly people's gait degrades, their risk of falling goes up dramatically.
   2. Geolocation for when individuals are at locations known to serve alcohol.  We could allow users to ask for gait tracking only when at locations that they likely drove to and likely serve alcohol. We could do this by integrating with maps to see when they're at those type of establishments.
   3. Group tracking to see gait levels and intoxication levels of a crowd to assess crowd safety.  If enough users are in a large crowd, such as at a concert, we could track the stability of the crowd, and potentially alert users to an unsafe crowd event.  There are certainly some tradeoffs with this, largely around privacy of individual user data.
   4. HRV tracking, especially for elderly people. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is highly correlated with movement performance, so we could track it on elderly people, and let them know which days they should be extra careful when moving around, or which day they might want to consider using an assisted walking device.

This gives us a pretty good list of things we could build, so now lets see which of them make sense to build.

I think the gyroscopic gate tracking is the key MVP here. Given that it has 2 use cases and could make a big difference to both individuals decisions to drive while intoxicated, and could help inform elderly individuals about a falling risk, I think it is certainly the P0.

I would look at #2, the geolocation, as a subset of #1.  Its not a different feature, but it might live in an options menu of #1.  We would ask users to select what type of tracking they want. All the time? Only when they click a button to "track for next 3 hours?" "only at this location?" etc.  This wouldn't need to be exactly in the MVP, but it would likely be a fast follow.
 

#3 and 4 are distinctly other features that we could prioritize later.  #3 could bring a lot of value, but there are some big risks to consider.  Apple making an assessment that a crowd is safe or unsafe is precarious legal territory, because we wouldn't want to certify a crowd situation is safe, so we wouldn't want individuals assuming that if we say its ok, that its guaranteed ok.  Its a potentially very useful tool, but we would need to review the viability of this with our legal team before any further work is done.

#4 has a lot of value, but might fit in better with a different tool, like Apple Health that tracks other health and wellness data. We could consult with that team and decide which roadmap it fits better into.

Summary

In conclusion, we decided to focus on the physical safety side of safety products.  When trying to make a product to make our users safer, we decided to build an application that will primarily focus on gait tracking. This allows us a couple of key benefits.  If a user's gait is sufficiently unstable for any reason, they are high risk of getting into an accident.  Our app can alert a user when they are in that risky group. This applies both for individuals who have been consuming substances, as well as elderly people who might be as risk of falling.