How does the Sleep Apnea feature work on Apple Watch?

The Apple Watch has always had a strong focus on health and fitness. An Apple Watch can monitor your heart rate, measure your maximal oxygen consumption, monitor your temperature, take an ECG , track your sleep, record your workouts, and more. Apple continues to add new health and fitness features to the Apple Watch with each new model, and this year is no different.

As part of its Glowtime event, Apple announced that the Apple Watch Series 10 will have a new health feature that allows your smartwatch to monitor your sleep for signs of sleep apnea. This is a common condition that affects your breathing when you sleep, and can lead to serious complications if left untreated.

What exactly is sleep apnea, what are the symptoms, and how does the new Sleep Apnea feature work on Apple Watch? Here’s what you need to know.

What is sleep apnea and how common is it?

A common condition that often goes undiagnosed

Apple

Sleep apnea is a common condition in which your breathing stops briefly or becomes shallow while you’re sleeping. These pauses in breathing disrupt your sleep patterns, which can have a negative impact on your health. The pauses can last just a few seconds or several minutes.

There are two main types of sleep apnea. The most common type is obstructive sleep apnea. This is when your airway becomes blocked while you sleep, making your breathing shallower or stopping it completely. Less common is central sleep apnea, which occurs when your brain does not send the correct signals to your body to tell it to breathe.

The most obvious impact of sleep apnea is that your body isn’t fully refreshed when you sleep due to the regular interruptions. This means that you feel tired and irritable even after several hours asleep.

Tiredness isn’t the only issue, however. Left untreated, sleep apnea can lead to serious issues such as diabetes, heart disease, depression, memory loss, and more.

What are the symptoms of sleep apnea?

Many symptoms are easy to miss

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There are several symptoms that can indicate sleep apnea, but many of these are things that you may not necessarily assume are linked to a sleep disorder. According to Apple, more than one billion people worldwide are estimated to be impacted by sleep apnea, and as many as 80% of cases of sleep apnea go undiagnosed.

Symptoms of sleep apnea include:

Excessive tiredness
Irritability
Loud snoring
Headaches during the morning
Dry mouth when waking up
Poor attention span
Forgetfulness
Mood swings

Many of these symptoms are things that we may ignore as being part of everyday life, so having a feature on the Apple Watch that can spot the signs of sleep apnea could help more people to find the cause of their symptoms.

How does the Sleep Apnea feature work on Apple Watch?

Your watch uses machine learning to look for signs of sleep apnea

Breathing disturbances chart in Health app on iPhone

Apple

The new Sleep Apnea feature on Apple Watch is able to track your sleep and look for indications that you are suffering from sleep apnea. All you need to do is wear your Apple Watch when you go to bed, and your Apple Watch will automatically monitor your sleep for indications of sleep apnea every 30 days.

Apple says that the feature uses advanced machine learning that has been trained on data from people who suffer from sleep apnea. The feature looks for evidence of breathing disturbances during your sleep that are symptomatic of the condition.

Your Apple Watch will automatically monitor your sleep for indications of sleep apnea every 30 days.

Your Apple Watch will send you an alert if moderate to severe sleep apnea is detected over the course of multiple sleep sessions. You can also find information in the Health app on your iPhone about when potential sleep apnea has occurred during your sleep. You’ll see a chart showing your breathing during sleep, with indications of whether it was elevated or not.

The Health app will also allow you to generate a PDF of the breathing disturbances that you can then share with a health professional, as well as provide more general information about sleep apnea.

How accurate is Apple’s Sleep Apnea feature?

The feature has gone through extensive testing

Apple

Apple claims that the Sleep Apnea feature has been part of a clinical study of “unprecedented size” and that every person who received a Sleep Apnea alert turned out to be suffering from at least mild sleep apnea. With FDA approval expected to be granted soon, it seems that the Sleep Apnea feature on Apple Watch is likely to have a high degree of accuracy.

As with all health information provided by wearables, it’s important to remember that it is unlikely to be 100% accurate. If you do receive an alert about potential sleep apnea, you should consider speaking to a medical professional to confirm your diagnosis.

Which Apple Watch models support the Sleep Apnea Feature?

You won’t need a new Apple Watch to test for Sleep Apnea

The new Sleep Apnea feature was announced at Apple’s launch event, in which Apple introduced the new Apple Watch Series 10, the new iPhone 16 models , and other new devices such as new models of AirPods. However, you won’t need to purchase a new Apple Watch in order to use the Sleep Apnea feature.

Apple confirmed that the feature will also be coming to the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 . If you own one of these models, you’ll need to upgrade to watchOS 11 when it is released.