Apple uses AI to uncover new blood pressure notification feature in watch

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 19 (Reuters): Apple Watch Series 11 models that went on sale on Friday can notify users that they may have high blood pressure, in a feature the company has powered using artificial intelligence rather than a blood pressure monitor.

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 had been interested for years in trying to identify high blood pressure, she told Reuters.

The condition affects more than 1 billion people globally, but half of the adults with it go undiagnosed, in part because the standard for measuring blood pressure - a cuff called a sphygmomanometer - is something many people encounter only at a doctor's office.

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.