Apple on Tuesday announced Apple Watch Series 6, introducing a revolutionary Blood Oxygen feature that offers users even more insight into their overall wellness. Apple Watch Series 6 delivers many notable hardware improvements, including a faster S6 System in Package (SiP) and next-generation always-on altimeter, along with its most colorful lineup yet, featuring a beautiful palette of new case finishes and bands. watchOS 7 brings Family Setup, sleep tracking, automatic handwashing detection, new workout types, and the ability to curate and share watch faces, encouraging customers to be more active, stay connected, and better manage their health in new ways.
Brian X. Chen for The New York Times:
The feature is particularly timely with the coronavirus, because some patients in critical condition with COVID-19 have had low blood oxygen levels.
I had a day to test the new $399 Apple Watch to measure my blood oxygen level. The process was simple: You open the blood oxygen app on the device, keep your wrist steady and hit the Start button. After 15 seconds, during which a sensor on the back of the watch measures your blood oxygen level by shining lights onto your wrist, it shows your reading. In three tests, my blood oxygen level stood between 99 percent and 100 percent.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this information. So I asked two medical experts about the new feature. Both were cautiously optimistic about its potential benefits, especially for research. The ability to constantly monitor blood oxygen levels with some degree of accuracy, they said, could help people discover symptoms for health conditions like sleep apnea.
“Continuous recording of data can be really interesting to see trends,” said Cathy A. Goldstein, a sleep physician at the University of Michigan’s Medicine Sleep Clinic… A healthy person will usually have blood oxygen levels in the mid- to high 90s. When people have health conditions such as lung disease, sleep disorders or respiratory infections, levels can dip to the 60s to the low 90s, Dr. Goldstein said.
Blood oxygen monitoring may be more useful for people who are already known to have health problems, Dr. Weiss said. For example, if someone with a history of heart failure saw lower saturation levels in their blood oxygen during exercise, that information could be shared with a doctor, who could then modify the treatment plan.
The information could also be used to determine whether a sick person should go to the hospital. “If a patient called me and said, ‘I have Covid and my oxygen level is at 80 percent,’ I would say, ‘Go to the hospital,”’ Dr. [Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco], said.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Watch’s revolutionary Blood Oxygen feature will become even more valuable with time, as research studies discover new ways to utilize it for health and wellness.