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wlatest chicken Apple The watch models were unveiled last month, boasting longer battery life, larger displays and satellite connectivity apple watch The Ultra 3 were attractive. But it was a new health feature that was the real attraction: notifications for high blood pressurei.e. high blood pressure,
Apple has put health and heart at the forefront of its Watch for years, with ECG readings and blood oxygen measurements among recent highlights.
Spoke to Sumbul Desai, Apple’s Vice President of Health Independent Shortly after the announcement to explain the new feature and the thinking behind it.
Dr. Desai says, “To be honest, we have wanted to work on hypertension for many years. Hypertension affects more than a billion people worldwide, but less than half of those cases are diagnosed. We wanted to raise awareness and give people more power to avoid certain complications in the future.”
But how to measure it? Traditional methods, where a doctor places a cuff on your arm, may not be the best.
“Often, when I would see people in the clinic, they would come in,” Dr. Desai explains, “and they would be really nervous, so their blood pressure would go up, or they would just run from parking their car and, again, the blood pressure would go up. But does that really reflect what their blood pressure is as they go about their everyday lives?”
The new feature isn’t like heart rate, where you can start reading immediately. Here, the feature works in the background by measuring blood pressure over a period of 30 days. “We wanted to get an idea of your blood pressure as you’re just living your life,” says Desai.
At the end of that period, if it detects what appears to be a high blood pressure reading, the Watch will notify you and encourage you to log your blood pressure.
Other wearable devices can measure your blood pressure, such as the Hilo Band and Samsung smartwatches. They usually require calibration with a traditional cuff, but that’s not necessary here – again, Apple wants a simple process.
“At Apple we think of health as holistic, and one of the keys to managing high blood pressure is exercise. I always say, if I could share anything, it would be movement, because it’s the key to so many conditions,” she adds.
While the heart rate monitor on the Apple Watch shows you beats per minute, no data is revealed for high blood pressure. Why so?
“It was a few things, like keeping it more simple and friendly. The way our algorithm works is that we compared it to the ground truth with the cuff, but we did it over a period of 30 days. Your blood pressure, one minute, may be high, then you sit down, and it goes down,” explains Desai. “So, we decided not to focus on one number: we had a lot of outliers because of so much variation. And so it was better to do the aggregate over a 30-day period. The way the algorithm works is it looks at a signal that is indicative of high blood pressure, but not necessarily measuring the actual number, but it correlates with the blood pressure number. We don’t directly measure systolic and diastolic in the traditional sense. Have been.
“What we’re measuring is how the blood is flowing and what the reaction of the blood flow is to the heartbeats, and that’s related to blood pressure, which is why we didn’t put in an exact number for a reason. We wanted to start with how do we get a true sense of your blood pressure as you’re living your life without fixation on the number? And that’s why given the technology that we have, we decided to look at it more from this vantage point.”
Although no numbers are shown, the algorithm knows what the range is. It compares your personal readings over 30 days and then resets. “We had people measure their blood pressure at different points during the day, and that’s how we correlated the signals. We’re looking at trace patterns of signals that correlate with elevated blood pressure,” says Dr. Desai.
She also points out that the sensitivity of the analysis is low – Desai says it will detect four out of ten cases – compared to the specificity which is very high, about 92 percent.
“We did that because people who get the notification, we wanted to feel confident that they would have a positive result. We didn’t want to create a situation where, if the numbers were low, let’s say, we had false positives, and we wanted to make sure that there was confidence in the algorithm when someone is using it. So, we made the compromise of not being able to catch everybody, because if you look at the high blood pressure numbers, it’s still Quite a large number. But those who actually get it. notification, we are confident that this will lead to a phase one or phase two diagnosis. If you are informed, chances are you will have a condition.”
The 30-day system means it will assess your data for 30 days and if it doesn’t find anything it will reset and start checking again in the next 30 days. “If you get a notification, it’s not like the process stops, we still keep checking in the background. I think this has the potential to shorten the time it takes for people to be diagnosed with high blood pressure,” Dr. Desai hopes.
The assessment takes place several times a day, for example, not when you are on a vigorous run, as your heart rate will naturally be elevated. There is no set number of readings, but there is a minimum of 30 days for Apple to be confident in the data. Each reading takes just a few seconds.
This feature has a future, Desai thinks: “We do the proper validation testing to get regulatory approval, because regulators have to feel that we’re not giving anyone false information. But I think the field is ripe for understanding more. It’s a very innovative system in the way it does this, and we think we’ll learn that there may be other signs that may be indicative of it, but we started with high blood pressure. And I think That’s what’s so remarkable.”