[imagesource:apple]

Sleep apnea affects 936 million adults around the world.

Figuring out if you have this sleep disorder, in which breathing stops and starts overnight, often demands what many would deem an uncomfortable night’s sleep, complete with sensors affixed all over your body and even nestled inside your nostrils.

And while the Apple Watch can’t replicate a sleep study or diagnose sleep conditions – not that it’s even trying to – Apple wants to at least help people figure out whether they should speak with their doctor about getting one.

The new Apple Watch Series 10, along with the Series 9 and Ultra 2, is able to detect signs of moderate to severe sleep apnea. The innovative new watch feature, designed to track wrist movements linked to breathing interruptions, received the green light from the Food and Drug Administration on Monday. It will debut on the Series 10 at launch and will also be accessible for other compatible watches with the rollout of WatchOS 11. For those of us in South Africa, Digicape, the country’s largest independent Apple retailer, is the place to go.

Among the approximately 30 million individuals in the US grappling with sleep apnea—a condition associated with a heightened risk of type 2 diabetes and other serious health complications if left untreated—only 6 million have received a diagnosis, according to a 2022 report from the American Medical Association. This startling statistic suggests that many may be unaware of their condition, highlighting the potential benefits of tools like Apple’s new sleep apnea notification feature.

This lifesaver on your wrist took more than 11,000 nights of sleep recordings to get it right, according to Dr Matt Bianchi, a research scientist on Apple’s Health Technologies team.

“One of the ways we make sure that we don’t make mistakes or misconstrue movements like that is to collect an incredible amount of ground truth data across a huge variety of people, sleeping in the lab, in a sleep center, sleeping at home in their natural environment,” Bianchi said in a virtual interview with CNET about how Apple developed the feature.

In 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared with CNBC that the company’s “greatest contribution to mankind” would revolve around health, and the Apple Watch has undeniably been a pivotal player in advancing that vision.

Initially launched nearly a decade ago as a niche luxury accessory for the iPhone, the Apple Watch has transformed over the past ten years into a robust health monitoring device. It can now detect irregular heart rhythms, identify hard falls, and track changes in body temperature, among a host of other vital health and wellness metrics. The addition of sleep apnea detection marks yet another significant stride in this evolution.

“Even after a short period of time, we started to hear from users who were noticing things about their health and fitness that they maybe would not have noticed before,” Deidre Caldbeck, senior director for Apple Watch and Health product marketing at Apple, said regarding the Apple Watch’s health tracking features. “So we started to pull on those threads.”

So how exactly does the Apple Watch detect sleep apnea?

Sleep apnea is typically diagnosed through either a sleep study or an at-home sleep apnea test. A sleep study, known as a polysomnogram, requires wearing an array of sensors that measure brain waves during different sleep stages, monitor heart activity with an ECG sensor, detect muscle and eye movements, assess airflow with breathing sensors, and capture blood oxygen levels using a pulse oximeter, as outlined by the Cleveland Clinic.

With the Apple watch, this is all cut to the chase.

The main benefits of devices like the Apple Watch that can pick up on signs of sleep apnea at home is that doctors have more nights worth of data to work with. Plus, it could help encourage people to speak with their doctor before the condition worsens.

This is done with the one Apple Watch sensor that plays a primary role in picking up potential sleep apnea signals: the motion-detecting accelerometer.

As you breathe throughout the night, your chest oscillates, and these subtle movements are transmitted to your arm, where they can be detected at the wrist using the watch’s accelerometer, according to Bianchi. This data is captured in a new metric known as breathing disturbances, which are logged within the Apple Health app.

“When you have an interruption in breathing where you’re either taking more shallow breaths, or you stop breathing for 20 or 30 seconds, that can be read out and detected through machine learning algorithms,” Bianchi said.

The chips inside the Apple Watch Series 10, Series 9 and Ultra 2 are also a large part of what drives the Apple Watch’s sleep apnea detection, Caldbeck said, which is why the feature is available only on those models.

An algorithm analyzes breathing disturbance data on the watch and will send a notification if signs of sleep apnea are present.

However, sleep apnea isn’t the only reason why you may experience a breathing disturbance overnight; factors like alcohol consumption, congestion from illness and your position while sleeping can also have an impact. That’s why the Apple Watch looks for breathing disturbances over a 30-day window before sending that notification.

General sleep tests only track you over one night, maybe two nights.

“We don’t want to react to the incidental three days of a long weekend or brief illness,” Bianchi said. “We want to make sure that we’re capturing what is really you.”

As part of the clinical validation process, Apple worked with academic medical centres’ hospital systems and clinical research organisations to gather more than 11,000 nights of sleep data.

They’ve done their part. If you head over to Digicape, perhaps you can too.

[source:cnet]