Apple uses AI to reveal new blood pressure notification features on the watch

The Apple Watch Series 11 models, which will be on sale on Friday, can notify users that they may have high blood pressure. This can be notified using artificial intelligence rather than blood pressure monitors with features that the company is powering.

The notifications that work with the model back to Apple Watch Series 9 resulted from applying the AI ​​model to existing sensor data, said Sumbul Ahmad Desai, vice president of health at Apple.

Apple has been interested in trying to identify hypertension for years, she told Reuters.

This condition affects more than a billion people worldwide, but half of adults with it have not been diagnosed. This is because cuffs called irrigation meters, which are the standard for measuring blood pressure, are only encountered in doctors' offices.

Using AI, Apple can sort data from 100,000 people registered in the heart, originally launched in 2019, to see if the feature can be found in signal data from the watch's main heart-related sensors, matching it with traditional blood pressure measurements.

After multiple layers of machine learning, Apple came up with an algorithm that tested it in a specific study with 2,000 participants.

Apple's privacy measures mean “one of the ironies here is that there is no much data available outside of the context of a large-scale research,” Desai said. However, data from these studies “scientifically gives us a sense of what some other signals are worthy of threading… these studies are very powerful.”

The US Food and Drug Administration-approved feature does not directly measure blood pressure, but it encourages users to notify them that they may have high blood pressure, and use cuffs to measure it and consult a doctor.

Apple plans to deploy the function in more than 150 countries, Ami Bhatt, chief innovation officer at the U.S. Department of Cardiology, said it will help people detect hypertension early and reduce related conditions such as heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease.

Batt, who said her opinion was her own and did not represent the university's views, said that Apple seemed to be careful to avoid false positives that might warn users. However, she said iPhone makers should emphasize that new features are not a replacement for traditional measurements and specialized diagnostics.

“There is also the risk of false relief. Those who do not receive an alert may mistakenly assume that they have no high blood pressure,” Batt said in an interview.