A few days ago, we looked into how Apple could one day use brain wave sensors in AirPods to measure sleep quality and even detect seizures.
Now, a new paper shows how the company is exploring deeper cardiac health insights with the help of AI. Here are the details.
A bit of context
With watchOS 26, Apple introduced Hypertension notifications on the Apple Watch.
As the company explains it:
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.
While this feature is far from a medical-grade diagnosis tool, and Apple is the first to acknowledge that “hypertension notifications will not detect all instances of hypertension,” the company also claims the feature is expected “to notify over 1 million people with undiagnosed hypertension within the first year”.
One important aspect of this feature is that it is not based on instant measurements, but rather on data over 30-day periods, which means that its algorithms analyze trends, rather than producing real-time hemodynamic readings or estimating specific cardiovascular parameters.
And that’s precisely where this new Apple study comes in.
Getting more data from the optical sensor
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