Apple Watch in India gets hypertension alert feature, using 30-day data it will detect high-blood pressure

Among many diseases that can exist in the body without a person knowing about it, hypertension is arguably the most common. There is an estimate that it affects over 1.4 billion people across the globe and almost 40 per cent of them are not even aware that they have it. It is to tackle this problem that Apple added a new hypertension notification feature to Watch a few months ago. The Watch Series 9 and newer and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and newer are supported. Now, after regulatory approvals, the feature is rolling out in India.
Apple says the hypertension notifications feature will alert users if signs of chronic high blood pressure, or hypertension, are detected. This is a one-time alert feature. It uses specific algorithms to monitor data collected through the optical heart sensor on the Apple Watch. This data is analysed to see how a user’s blood vessels respond to the beats of the heart and after an analysis that spans over 30 days, the Watch will notify users if it detects consistent signs of hypertension.
“As a clinician in a cardiologist, it's something that we see so often that people come in having had hypertension for years and years and just not know it because it's an asymptomatic disease,” Adam Phillips, a cardiologist at Apple, told India Today Tech. “So having this feature at the scale that Apple operates at available to our users is really huge.”
Phillips says that the feature has been developed with a lot of care and thoroughness and false positives have been minimised greatly. “We develop our feature with a lot of rigour in both the development phase and the clinical validation phase, and we developed (Hypertension Notification) with over a hundred thousand participants in development and then clinically validated it with over 2000 participants,” he says. “We expect to notify over a million people in the 1st year alone.”
The feature may prove particularly useful for Watch users in India, a country where hypertension is almost endemic, with reports noting that one in every third Indian is likely to have hypertension. And yet, the diagnosis of the disease remains rather poor because it rarely shows up with symptoms in early stages.
Alert but no blood pressure monitoring
As the feature is rolling out, it is important to understand what it does and what it doesn’t. It is quite simple. The feature, as its name — Hypertension Notification — suggests, is a one-time alert that can help Watch users detect a condition that they don’t know about. To do this, as noted earlier, the Watch relies on data collected through a heart rate sensor. In that sense, the feature does not perform an on-demand blood pressure recording like the machines with cuffs do.
To enable the feature, users will have to set it up in the Health app. During the setup process they will be asked to fill in certain details such as age. Only users 22 or older can use this feature. Also if you already have hypertension and you take drugs for it, the Hypertension Notification is not for you.
Once it finds latent hypertension, the Watch will encourage users to go for a thorough test. Phillips says that once the Watch detects hypertension, “it will give (users) next steps that are really actionable for, for them to go check their blood pressure (and) log in at home” using a regular blood pressure machine.
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