You can add “helping to detect sleep apnea” and “helping to detect hypertension” to the list of nifty things the Apple Watch can do.
A new study released from health startup Cardiogram and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) suggests that wearable devices like the Apple Watch, Fitbit and others are able to accurately detect common but serious conditions like hypertension and sleep apnea.
Cardiogram and UCSF had previously demonstrated the Apple Watch’s ability to detect abnormal heart rhythms with 97 percent accuracy. The new study states that the Apple Watch can detect sleep apnea with a 90 percent accuracy and hypertension with an 82 percent accuracy.
The American Sleep Apnea Association has estimated that 22 million adults in the U.S. suffer from sleep apnea, with another 80 percent of cases of moderate and severe obstructive sleep apnea undiagnosed. This affected person can stop breathing in their sleep and can possibly lead to death.
Another 75 million American adults have high blood pressure (hypertension), according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), putting them at risk for heart disease and stroke, the top causes of death in the United States.
The new N=6,158 study recruited 6,115 participants through the Cardiogram app to test using their Apple Watch over a period of time. Study leads were then able to detect sleep apnea in 1,016 of the participants and hypertension in 2,230 of the subjects using a trained deep learning algorithm called DeepHeart.
Cardiogram and UCSF’s study on heart health is the third major study of deep learning in medicine, following Google Brain’s results on diabetic eye disease in December of 2016 and a Stanford study on skin cancer this January.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via TechCrunch