New Apple Watch Can Help Diagnose Sleep Apnea

Sleep apnea is “a common condition in which your breathing stops and restarts repeatedly while you sleep,” according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. While it’s common, it’s a serious health problem, as it can lead to conditions such as high blood pressure, heart problems, stroke, diabetes, and mental health issues. It can also lead to excessive daytime sleepiness, which increases your risk of having an accident while driving or operating machinery.

Sleep apnea is also underdiagnosed. According to the American Medical Association, about 30 million Americans have sleep apnea, but only 6 million of those people have an actual diagnosis. That’s a ratio the new Apple Watch feature hopes to reduce.

Apple will do this by monitoring small wrist movements with an accelerometer in the watch that it says are linked to sleep disturbances. These will be collected into a new metric called “Breathing Disturbances,” which you can graph over time in the Health app. If you regularly experience breathing disturbances, an Apple Watch algorithm trained on the breathing patterns of people with sleep apnea will be able to determine whether those disturbances indicate you have the condition. If so, you’ll get a warning that you may need to see a doctor.

Making the leap from thinking to the past hmm i need to see a doctor Getting a diagnosis and treatment is the most important thing for many people, which is why the gap between people with sleep apnea and those with a diagnosis is so wide, experts say.

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“Patients often think they have to spend the night in a sleep center to be diagnosed with sleep apnea,” Yerem Yeghiazarians, MD, an interventional cardiologist at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center and chair of the scientific writing group for the American Heart Association, previously told Well+Good about the connection between sleep apnea and heart health. “So they may not discuss it with their doctor.”

Dr. Yeghiazarians notes that there are already at-home sleep study kits that people can use instead. But removing that extra barrier by making monitoring regular and passive — using only the watch they’re already wearing — could make an even bigger dent in sleep apnea screening.

In a clinical study, Apple validated that all people who received sleep apnea notifications from the watch indeed had at least mild sleep apnea diagnoses. Apple says it expects to receive FDA clearance for the feature, though it doesn’t have it yet.

While a user can bring three months of data to their doctor if they get the notification, it’s unclear how quickly the Apple Watch can determine whether you might have sleep apnea. Well+Good has reached out to Apple for more information and will update this story if and when we hear back.