Wall Street Journal: Biden Can Stand for the Little Guy Against Apple by David Albert
I’ve been interested in cardiac health since 1966, when my father, Rep. Carl Albert, had his first heart attack. (He recovered and served as House speaker, 1971-77.) I have published many scientific papers and received scores of patents.
I founded AliveCor in 2010 to engage with some of the best minds in technology who share this passion. We created the first electrocardiogram technology for smartphones that gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Apple came calling. Top executives brought us in for meetings, signed nondisclosure agreements and asked all sorts of questions about our technology. In what we thought was a cooperative spirit, we launched KardiaBand in 2016 for the Apple Watch cleared by the FDA. KardiaBand monitors heart rate and activity and can capture a medical-grade EKG in 30 seconds.
But in 2018 Apple made a flashy announcement claiming that it had created its own EKG technology for its watches. And it made its new operating system incompatible with SmartRhythm, AliveCor’s continuous-monitoring feature. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been shocked. As Steve Jobs once said, “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”