Apple has today announced that sleep apnea notifications are coming to Apple Watch, while AirPods Pro will soon get a built-in hearing test feature. These tools are designed to help detect two very common but often overlooked health issues, sleep apnea and hearing loss. While these features should not be treated as outright medical diagnoses, they can certainly help detect concerning health issues early on. Let’s explore these features in detail.
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Sleep apnea notifications on Apple Watch
Firstly, what is sleep apnea? It is a common but potentially serious sleep disorder where your breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep, leading to multiple health issues. To bring this matter to the users’ attention, supported Apple Watches will detect and analyse your breathing while you sleep. Using the built-in accelerometer, it tracks wrist movements to detect irregular breathing patterns and calculates a new metric called Breathing Disturbances.
Over 30 days, the watch uses machine learning to analyse your sleep patterns. If it spots consistent signs of moderate to severe sleep apnea, it will notify you and recommend that you consult a doctor. You’ll also be able to check your nightly breathing disturbances in the Apple Health app, view trends over one month, six months, or even a full year, and easily export a PDF report to share with your doctor. The app also includes helpful educational material about sleep apnea.
The ability to generate PDF reports for doctors and access educational content inside the Health app shows Apple is thinking beyond just collecting data. It’ll potentially help users take the next step towards fixing their sleeping patterns. However, since many people buy Apple Watches primarily for fitness and notifications, whether users will consistently wear their watch while sleeping remains to be seen. If you’re an existing Apple Watch user concerned about sleep health, these new features might make upgrading to a supported model worthwhile.
Hearing Test on AirPods Pro
Apple is also adding a proper clinical-grade hearing test to AirPods Pro. Using a method called pure-tone audiometry, the AirPods will play a series of tones and sounds (from 250Hz to 8,000Hz) to measure your hearing sensitivity in each ear. The whole test takes just about five minutes. Once finished, you’ll get a hearing score for each ear, a classification of your hearing ability, personalised recommendations, and a full audiogram. All results are stored securely in the Apple Health app and can be easily shared with doctors or hearing specialists.
Apple notes that the Hearing Test feature will be available on AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods Pro 3. That said, both this and apnea notifications for Apple Watch further strengthen Apple’s position as a company that values the health and well-being of its users by making the best use of its devices.
Apnea notifications and hearing test for the Apple Watch and AirPods Pro, respectively, are one of Apple’s more impactful health features in recent years. While competitors like Samsung and Google also offer similar features, Apple’s execution (long-term data tracking, clean reports, and integration with the Health app) feels like it has brought something genuinely useful to the table that could go a long way in aiding users with their sleep and hearing issues.
