Starting with watchOS 11, the Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 can warn you about symptoms of sleep apnea. The smartwatch can check for pauses in breathing during your sleep.
Sleep apnea is a condition in which you experience breathing stops during your sleep, which prevents you from sleeping well. If this is not treated, you run a greater risk of high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and heart problems. From now on, you can get a warning for symptoms of sleep apnea, so that you can discuss this with your GP.
Sleep tracking with Apple Watch
Getting a good night’s sleep is important for your health, but it’s not always easy for everyone. Tracking your sleep patterns is a great place to start, and you can do that with the Sleep app for Apple Watch. This app helps you stick to a routine so you can reach your sleep goals.
Wearing your Apple Watch at night can monitor your heart rate, and the accelerometer in the smartwatch can detect the subtlest movements of your breathing to tell when you’re awake or asleep. Starting with watchOS 11, it can also detect sleep apnea on some models.
Sleep Apnea Explained
Most people have a regular, rhythmic breathing pattern while they sleep, but it is also quite normal to experience brief, temporary interruptions in breathing. Sleep apnea is a common condition in which a person experiences interruptions in breathing night after night. In any given sleep session, you may experience just a few interruptions or, at worst, more than 30 per hour.
Sleep apnea can make it difficult to get a full night’s sleep, which can lead to fatigue during the day. The condition can also increase your risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. Early diagnosis and treatment of sleep apnea can reduce the risk of physical and mental health conditions.
What happens with sleep apnea?
The most common type of sleep apnea is known as obstructive sleep apnea and occurs when the muscles in the back of your throat relax, narrowing or closing off your airway while you breathe. Other forms of sleep apnea, such as central sleep apnea, can occur, but are less common. If you have questions about sleep apnea, you should discuss them with your doctor.
How do you know if you have sleep apnea
Often, people with sleep apnea don’t realize they have symptoms because they occur during sleep. If you sleep next to someone, they may notice if you snore loudly, gasp for air, or have interruptions in your breathing.
As the day progresses, you may want to watch for signs of sleep apnea, such as excessive daytime fatigue, difficulty paying attention, morning headaches, and irritability.
Apple Watch has sleep apnea detection
Starting with watchOS 11, you can use an Apple Watch Ultra 2, series 9, or later to find out if you have sleep apnea. By wearing your watch while you sleep, your Apple Watch can check for symptoms of sleep apnea.
To detect sleep apnea, Apple Watch uses the accelerometer to track small movements on the wrist that are associated with interruptions in normal breathing patterns. The recordings are written to the Health app â–¸ Data â–¸ Breathing â–¸ Breathing Disturbances, compared using artificial intelligence.
While some of these disturbances are normal, they are important to track. They can be used to understand the restfulness of sleep and, if they occur frequently over multiple nights, can be linked to sleep apnea. Users can view their nocturnal breathing disturbances in the Health app, where they are classified as elevated or not elevated, and can be viewed over a one-month, six-month, or one-year period.
Sleep Apnea Notifications
If you wear your Apple Watch to bed, it can detect any disturbances in your breathing as you sleep. A few disturbances in breathing each night can be normal, but more frequent disturbances in breathing could be a sign of sleep apnea. If your Apple Watch detects increased disturbances in breathing over several nights, the Health app will send you a potential sleep apnea alert.
A report of sleep apnea is no diagnosis of sleep apnea. Only a doctor or healthcare team can make that diagnosis. If you receive a sleep apnea alert, it’s best to discuss it with your doctor at your next appointment. You can export a graph of your breathing issues that also includes an explanation of the alert. To do this, go to Health app ▸ Data ▸ Breathing ▸ Sleep apnea alerts.
Professional sleep apnea test
The Apple Watch’s sleep apnea detection is often the first step. If you think you have sleep apnea, it’s best to discuss it with your doctor. They’ll likely ask about your medical history and symptoms. Based on that, your doctor may recommend a sleep test or refer you to a sleep clinic. A professional test looks at how your body moves and how you breathe during sleep and is commonly used to diagnose sleep apnea and other sleep disorders.
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