Apple has received official approval for one of the headline features of its new watches: the ability to sense how hard your heart is beating.
The new hypertension feature is designed to spot when people have dangerously high blood pressure (hypertension). Unlike some tools, it doesn’t work by way of a cuff that squeezes the arm, but instead can detect signs of the condition using data collected by the watch’s heart rate sensor.
Hypertension is the leading modifiable risk factor for heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease, Apple said, and it affects somewhere in the region of 1.3 billion adults around the world. But it is often not diagnosed because it requires special equipment to spot, and it can be easily missed.
Apple says that the new feature is intended to identify wearers who might be at risk of high blood pressure by passively monitoring their heart rate data over 30 days. Users will then be notified if that data suggests they are showing signs of hypertension.
The company said it expects to notify more than a million people of undiagnosed hypertension within the first year of its introduction.
The tool was announced during Apple’s “Awe Dropping” event this week, where it showed off new iPhone devices, AirPods, and updated Apple Watches. Though the feature was shown off as part of those new watches, it will be available for wearables since the Apple Watch Series 9, which was released two years ago.
At the time of launch, Apple said it was expecting FDA approval soon, but that has now been granted and the feature will be available with the launch of the new watches.
Apple’s increasing focus on health has meant that a number of its recent features have needed approval from regulators before they can be offered to customers. Recent updates have included features that turn AirPods Pro into hearing aids, for instance.
While Apple has received swift approval from the FDA in the US, regulators in other countries must give their own agreement before the tools can go on sale elsewhere. That means that the rollout of a feature like this can often be staggered even after Apple has made it available.
Similar features to Apple’s blood-pressure-monitoring tool have previously proved to be controversial when it came to getting FDA approval. Fitness tech company Whoop, for example, has been locked in a dispute with the regulator over whether its own “blood pressure insights” tool needs to be authorised by the FDA as a medical device.
Whoop has argued that the tool is “a wellness feature, not a medical device”, and is not focused on diagnosing particular conditions. But the FDA has said that it is “inherently associated with the diagnosis of hypo- and hypertension” and therefore Whoop’s claim that it is not intended for medical use is incorrect.
