Apple is highlighting advanced heart-health readings on its Watch in India as smartwatch shipments decline but health-focused demand grows. NEW DELHI: Apple is making a sharper health pitch for its Watch in India. More frequent heart readings and new recovery insights underpin its latest push, as demand for advanced smartwatches grows even while the wider market contracts.Eric Jue, director of Apple Watch Worldwide Product Marketing, told TOI that the redesigned health sensing system in Series 12 and Ultra 4 can measure heart rate as often as every five seconds, including while users are moving.“One of the through lines for the product has always been on the health and the fitness side,” Jue said. The challenge was to deliver more frequent readings without reducing battery life, allowing people to wear the Watch through the day and overnight.The India opportunity comes against a divided market. Smartwatch shipments fell 4% year-on-year to 6.4 million units in April–June 2026, according to IDC. Advanced-smartwatch shipments, however, rose 94.8%, increasing their share from 2.2% to 4.5%. Apple, Samsung and Garmin led this segment, helped by earlier-generation devices. IDC did not disclose Apple’s individual share.Jue said access to frequent readings during ordinary activities would “open up a lot of health insights”, including through future research. The system also measures heart rate variability, the variation in time between successive beats, to help users understand recovery against their own baseline.A new readiness score combines recent activity, sleep and vital signs on a scale of zero to 10, with labels such as “recover”, “pace yourself”, “ready” and “go for it”.“This readiness score will help inform people about how their body is responding to stress and recovery and they can make decisions based on that information,” Jue said.There is a practical requirement: users must wear the Watch overnight and obtain a sleep score. Comfort and charging habits therefore matter, particularly for those who find the larger Ultra difficult to wear in bed.Apple is working with doctors in Delhi on investigator-supported studies testing the Watch on Indian users in clinical settings, its clinical team said. It did not disclose sample sizes or findings.Separately, Apple cited a comparative study involving more than 1,000 people to support its claim of having the most accurate heart-rate sensing in a wearable.Steve Waydo, Apple’s director of health sensing, said the testing covered different activities, ages and skin tones across sites in the US and Malaysia. Indian participation was not confirmed.“Skin tone can be an important factor in performance of optical wearables,” Waydo said. “We made sure to cover people on the very lightest and very darkest skin tone end of the scale.”The increased sensing frequency is restricted to the new models because it “is a hardware enabled feature”, Waydo said. The redesign covers both internal chips and optical components, making a software upgrade insufficient for older Watches.“One of the key challenges here was to try and bring this more comprehensive coverage in heart rate without sacrificing battery life for our users,” he said.Both models offer identical health features from the new sensor, Jue said. Users also retain control over monitoring.“You’ve always been able to disable background heart rate should you wish,” Waydo said. Apple’s clinical team said it tests the language, colours and presentation of insights to ensure the information is meaningful without overwhelming users.
