Apple may make it easier to measure blood pressure with Apple Watch

Gadgets Now / Updated: Apr 23, 2021, 08:23PM IST

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Apple may make it easier to measure blood pressure with Apple Watch

After bringing ECG and blood oxygen tracker on the Apple Watch, the company is now eyeing ways to make it easier to measure blood pressure. Apple is reported working on a wearable device that can be synced with the Apple Watch to offer blood pressure results. Interestingly, this wearable device is said to be cuffless. This means you will not need to wear a tight band around your arm to measure your blood pressure.

As per a patent filling, Apple is said to be deploying neural networks and seismocardiogram data to offer cuffless blood pressure monitoring.

The patent filing talks about an individually-pruned neural network that can estimate blood pressure from a seismocardiogram (SMG). “In some examples, a baseline model can be constructed by training the model with SMG data and blood pressure measurement from a plurality of subjects. One or more filters (e.g., the filters in the top layer of the network) can be ranked by separability, which can be used to prune the model for each unseen user that uses the model thereafter, for example. In some examples, individuals can use individually-pruned models to calculate blood pressure using SMG data without corresponding blood pressure measurements,” as per the patent filing.

Meanwhile, Samsung has released an update to the Galaxy Watch Active 2 and Galaxy Watch 3 to offer ECG and Blood Pressure monitoring in some countries. To use the Blood Pressure feature, users will need to calibrate their Galaxy Watch Active 2 and Galaxy Watch 3 with a Blood Pressure monitor device. This is not available in India yet.

The process is simple, all users need to do is measure their blood pressure three times using both Galaxy Watch and blood pressure monitor devices and feed them into the Samsung Health Monitor app. However, all blood pressure monitoring devices come with a cuff and this is where Apple is trying to differentiate.

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