Will This Year’s Apple Watch Finally Get Blood Pressure Tracking?
Credit: Apple Watch Concept Render (Apple Tomorrow / Twitter)
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Although the Apple Watch already packs in a plethora of health sensors, there are two specific ones that the company has reportedly been working on for years that have yet to see the light of day — and it looks like Apple is still struggling with them.
The first of these, non-invasive blood glucose monitoring, has been something of a moonshot project from the start. It’s one of the “holy grails” of health monitoring since people with diabetes are forced to go through an inconvenient and uncomfortable process of drawing blood for measurements, often several times a day. A way to do this from your wrist would instantly change the lives of over 30 million people in the US alone, but it’s also essential that Apple get it right — and it’s a long way from that.
However, there’s another health monitoring feature that we’d really expected to see by now: blood pressure monitoring. Apple has reportedly been working on this since at least 2017, and we’ve heard nearly annual rumors of it coming in the next generation of the Apple Watch since the Series 5 in 2019.
Some reports suggested it would come to the Apple Watch Series 6 alongside the new blood oxygen monitoring feature. We may never know how far along Apple got, but one leaker reported it was scrapped as Apple couldn’t make it work accurately. There’s a good chance it never made it past the prototyping stage, but that didn’t stop another series of rumors from suggesting it could come to the Apple Watch Series 7 — which it didn’t.
At the time, Apple was reportedly focusing on a body temperature sensor, but most reliable sources agreed that wasn’t going to make the cut for the Series 7. Instead, it was part of a suite of health-related improvements that The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+ link) had said were slated for the 2022 Apple Watch Series 8, which also included sleep tracking. Some believed blood pressure monitoring would arrive in that model, but while the other predictions turned out to be accurate, blood pressure remained an elusive feature.
The WSJ also revealed back then that Apple was already working on sleep apnea detection, although it wasn’t expected to arrive in the short term. That arrived on last year’s Apple Watch Series 10. However, a blood pressure sensor was still missing, despite a prediction of its arrival from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
By that point, Gurman and others had revealed that Apple had given up on accurate blood pressure monitoring and was looking instead at hypertension alerts — a feature that would let you know if you had abnormally high blood pressure so you could pull out a blood pressure cuff to check it out. Sadly, it seems it’s still been struggling to get that working properly — and the struggle continues.
By last summer, Gurman conceded the blood pressure sensor would miss the Series 10, noting that sources had told him the company had “run into some serious snags.” The hope was that this would be pushed off to the Apple Watch Series 11, but it seems that we’re still on the same merry-go-round, as Gurman reported this week that “the company continues to run into problems while testing its long-planned blood-pressure tracking feature.”
There’s no doubt that Apple is still working on this, but it seems like it’s almost as complicated a nut for them to crack as blood glucose monitoring. While that may be a bit surprising considering some rival smartwatches, like Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 7, support blood pressure monitoring, it’s important to note that these devices aren’t approved for that by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), so the feature can’t be used in the United States.
The few wearables that have received FDA clearance for blood pressure monitoring are specialized devices, like the Omron HeartGuide, a bulkier affair that uses an inflatable cuff to take readings. Apple is unlikely to take that approach, nor is the company interested in adding a feature that won’t be approved in the US (at least not deliberately).
The bottom line is that we wouldn’t suggest getting your hopes up for blood pressure monitoring on any of this year’s Apple Watch models. If Apple is still having problems at this stage, it will likely scrap the technology entirely for this year’s model, as it needs to ramp up validation testing to prepare for a fall launch.
The Apple Watch Ultra 3 will reportedly get 5G and satellite connectivity, but the Apple Watch Series 11 may once again skip any new health sensors. The good news is that a more powerful S11 chip in this year’s model might unlock AI-driven health analysis to help give you a better understanding of what all the health data collected by the Apple Watch actually means.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
