Apple Watch hypertension alerts cleared by FDA ➹

The way Apple has pretty much set the Watch Series apart from the SE is by shipping more health features, and this is a nice one for them to target, especially considering they bothered to make it available to older devices as well and are targeting to ship it pretty much worldwide.

I think a lot of people are going to be interested in this (I’m lucky enough to be reasonably sure I don’t have hypertension, but most people my age have some sort of concern around it).

Of course, like all things in this space, a lot of the actual measuements need to be taken with a grain of salt (HR and Afib have been spot on over the years, but sleep tracking and other things that, like this feature, rely on indirect inference from sensors designed to do other things naturally have difference confidence intervals).

I trust Apple more than anyone else to handle the data for this (given that processing will happen on-device), but I wonder how far we are from the dystopia where insurance companies are going to start asking for access to this kind of data when negotiating policies…

(I don’t like linking to The Verge ever since they went full-on paywall+subscriptions, but the gist of the matter is still readable and it was the first place I saw this.)