Not every update turns out to be a good one, but some have the power to change people’s lives, and if you have a recent Apple Watch, you just might be in luck as Apple switches on a feature locally.
Thanks in part to approval by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, Apple Watch models from the Series 9 and higher including the latest Ultra 3 will now support the ability to track severe high blood pressure and a risk of hypertension, a factor that can lead to heart attack, stroke, and kidney disease.
It’s just one more thing a wearable can do, and echoes some of the blood pressure tracking other wearables offer.
For the Apple Watch, the technology uses data from the optical heart rate sensor used to measure your active and resting heart rate, and then analyses how blood vessels responds to the beats of the heart.
You won’t necessarily get the data automatically, and much like Samsung’s antioxidant tracking technology, it works over several weeks. With the Apple Watch, the hypertension algorithms are working with data over a 30-day period, notifying users if there are risks or signs of hypertension, which may prompt or nudge them into making preventative lifestyle changes.
Apple notes that there’s solid science behind this, with the machine learning model and training data coming from over 100,000 participants and then validated in a further study with over 2,000 more people. It’s still not technically a blood pressure monitor or cuff — there are definite electronic versions of those — but it could be handy for anyone at risk to wear.
That doesn’t mean it will detect all instances of hypertension, but it does suggest that if you are at risk, wearing a wearable like the Apple Watch could just get you closer to knowing more about your body and its warning signs, rather than simply going without.