Apple Watch is intelligent enough to detect apnea and hypertension, according to a new study whose results were made public today. According to the study, the Apple Watch can detect apnea with 90% accuracy and hypertension with 82% accuracy, all from a simple smart watch running special applications.
The study was done by the University of California and a start-up called Cardiogram, over 6000 people participating in the study to obtain these results. Among the people who used the Cardiogram application, 1016 were detected with apnea, while 2230 of the others were detected with hypertension, all thanks to the Apple Watch.
According to the president of Cardiogram, the Apple Watch can be used to monitor these conditions in people, all while they go about their daily lives. To obtain the results, Cardiogram used artificial intelligence, including interpreting data on heartbeats and distances traveled by users in their daily trips.
Apple has praised the Apple Watch many times for the extensive functionality it can offer, and what we see here is a very good proof of this. Of course, more research is needed to be able to say with 100% accuracy if a person suffers from one disease or another, so it remains to be seen how the study will evolve.
"The idea here is that by screening continuously you would identify people with hypertension who might not know they have it.Cardiogram's engineers took the kind of artificial neural networks that Google and others use to turn our speech into text and adapted them to interpret heart-rate and step count data. (Like speech, they are signals that vary over time.) The system, dubbed DeepHeart, is given strings of heart-rate and step data from multiple people, and information about their health conditions."
