Vic Gundotra's AliveCor is building a heart monitor band for the Apple Watch, waiting for FDA approval
Vic Gundotra, Former Google+ Boss, Is Building a Heart Monitor for the Apple Watch — AliveCor, a startup that builds heart-monitoring sensors for smartphones, is building sensors for another mobile device: The Apple Watch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Vic Gundotra took over AliveCor just months ago, arriving from Google to run a company whose smartphone heart monitors now have an obvious next home: the wrist of the new Apple Watch owner. The band AliveCor is building would make cardiac readings a first-class accessory rather than a phone add-on.
What follows in the coverage shows why the FDA wait matters: the KardiaBand eventually wins clearance as the first medical device accessory for the Watch, but Bloomberg reports Apple building its own EKG monitor — the same year Apple partners with Stanford on a heart-rhythm study.
First-order effects
- AliveCor converts its smartphone-sensor business into an Apple Watch hardware line, with Gundotra's hire signaling a push from niche clinical gadgets toward consumer-scale distribution.
Second-order effects
- Apple's own reported EKG work puts the platform owner on a collision course with its accessory maker: if the Watch ships with built-in cardiac sensing, AliveCor's band becomes redundant hardware competing against the host device itself.
Third-order effects
- If clearance arrives for both, the Apple Watch ecosystem splits between first-party sensors and certified third-party medical accessories, forcing startups like AliveCor to differentiate through software — its AI platform for flagging abnormal rhythms — rather than the sensor alone.
The trend: Consumer wearables are crossing into FDA-regulated medical devices, with platform owners like Apple increasingly absorbing the sensor functions their accessory partners pioneered.