Sleep Apnea notifications come to Aussie Apple Watch owners from today

Do you have sleep apnea? If you don’t know – how would you ever know? Well users of the Apple Watch will have better insights from now on as the long awaited Sleep Apnea notifications feature is enabled today for Australian users.

Approved just weeks ago by the TGA your Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10 and Ultra 2 are capable of detecting disturbances in your breathing to a medically accurate level enough to state if they think you might have sleep apnea.

It’s a remarkable thing.

I spoke with Dr. Matt Bianchi, Research Scientist, Health Technologies at Apple about the feature, and asked him just how big the problem of sleep apnea is, he told me “We’re talking about a billion people worldwide with this condition, but 80% of those individuals don’t have a diagnosis currently , they are not aware they have it”

“This is a treatable disorder, so the chance for us at that scale worldwide to chip away at that 80% undiagnosed problem is the motivating factor for us”

And how Apple does this detection is really quite simple, “The accelerometer sensor on the Apple Watch is a motion detector, but is very very sensitive, even those small motions of breathing that you make while you sleep can be seen at the wrist by the accelerometer and thats how we detect interruptions in breathing at the watch.”

Your watch is not listening, Dr Bianchi categorically ruled that out, it’s purely based on movement, however small that might be – your watch knows it.

You won’t get a Sleep Apnea notification in just one night, Dr Bianchi explained that the notification is based on data over several weeks but that the process to get started is quite simple.

“Once you are onboarded to sleep tracking, there’s a separate on-boarding for this regulated feature of sleep apnea notifications because it’s a step up into the clinical and regulated area”. Dr Bianchi explained that this feature is for Adults who do not already have an existing sleep apnea diagnosis.

He went on to say, “from that moment, from the first night you can see the breathing disturbances metric in the health app, but we don’t act on single nights in order to notify you to see a doctor, we want to see consistent elevations of this breathing disturbance metric over time, and for this feature its over 30 days, at least 10 nights in a 30 day period.”

Sleep Apnea notifications will roll out to compatible Apple Watches via a Software update today in Australia.