Building on its suite of advanced health features, Apple Watch Series 11 introduces groundbreaking hypertension notifications, which can alert users if signs of chronic high blood pressure — or hypertension — are detected. Hypertension is the leading modifiable risk factor for heart attack, stroke, and kidney disease, and impacts approximately 1.3 billion adults globally. It is frequently undiagnosed because it often has no symptoms, many people do not see a doctor regularly, and even during a clinical visit, it can be easily missed with a single measurement.
Hypertension notifications on Apple Watch use data from the optical heart sensor to analyze how a user’s blood vessels respond to the beats of the heart. The algorithm works passively in the background reviewing data over 30-day periods, and will notify users if it detects consistent signs of hypertension. These notifications provide users with valuable insights into their health as it relates to this widespread condition simply by wearing their Apple Watch, so they can begin making potentially lifesaving behavioral changes, or start treatment to reduce their risk of serious, long-term health events.
Hypertension notifications use data from the optical heart sensor on Apple Watch to analyze how a user’s blood vessels respond to the beats of the heart.
Like all of Apple’s health features, hypertension notifications are grounded in rigorous scientific validation. The feature was developed with advanced machine learning and training data from multiple studies totaling over 100,000 participants. Its performance was then validated in a clinical study of over 2,000 participants. While hypertension notifications will not detect all instances of hypertension, with the reach of Apple Watch, the feature is expected to notify over 1 million people with undiagnosed hypertension within the first year.
“Hypertension is the leading preventable cause of heart attack and stroke, yet millions remain undiagnosed,” said Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, cardiologist and scientist at Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital, said in a statement. “Making accurate detection easy and part of daily life can help people get care earlier and prevent avoidable harm.”
If users receive a hypertension notification, it is recommended that they log their blood pressure for seven days using a third-party blood pressure cuff and share the results with their provider at their next visit, which is consistent with the latest American Heart Association guidelines for the diagnosis and management of hypertension.
The feature is available in more than 150 countries and regions — including the U.S. and the EU — this month. Hypertension notifications will be available on Apple Watch Series 9 and later, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later, with watchOS 26.
The notification feature, which will work with models back to the Apple Watch Series 9, came about from applying AI models to existing sensor data, said Sumbul Ahmad Desai, Apple’s vice president of health.
Apple used AI to sort through the data from 100,000 people enrolled in a heart and movement study it originally launched in 2019 to see whether it could find features in the signal data from the watch’s main heart-related sensor that it could then match up with traditional blood pressure measurements, Desai said.
After multiple layers of machine learning, Apple came up with an algorithm that it then validated with a specific study of 2,000 participants.
Apple’s privacy measures mean that “one of the ironies here is we don’t get a lot of data” outside of the context of large-scale studies, Desai said. But data from those studies “gives us a sense of, scientifically, what are some other signals that are worth pulling the thread on … those studies are incredibly powerful.”
The feature, which received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, does not measure blood pressure directly, but notifies users that they may have high blood pressure and encourages them to use a cuff to measure it and talk to a doctor.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Watch’s Hypertension Notifications will save lives.
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