A team of researchers from the University of Waterloo looked at the ECG app integrated into Apple Watch, the company’s connected watches. Apple has done well to focus heavily on safety and health features: the scientists’ conclusions are very flattering.
The preamble to their research reveals their purpose: “Stress is an increasingly prevalent mental health problem that can have serious effects on human health. The development of stress prediction tools would greatly benefit public health enabling policy initiatives and early stress reduction interventions”. While the competition’s connected watches, whether it’s Samsung, Garmin or even Fitbit, have already integrated stress detection application applications into their products, the watches from the Apple brand n don’t offer any yet.
Professors Pedro Elkind Velmovitsky, Paulo Alencar, Scott T. Leatherdale, Donald Cowan and Plinio Pelegrini Morita have studied the ECG features of the Apple Watch. While the two weeks that the University experiment lasted in Waterloo, 600 participants measured their health stats every three hours, using either an iPhone 7 running iOS 15 or an Apple Watch Series 6 running watchOS 8.3.
Apple Watch’s ECG app and Artificial Intelligence measure stress levels
They applied machine learning algorithms and various predictive models (of a socio-economic nature, for example) to all the data collected by connected watches. These led to the conclusion that the measurements of atrial fibrillation and sinus rhythm provided by the electrocardiogram of the Apple Watch are extremely precise.
Apple products are lauded for their health features; we can’t even count the number of times the Apple Watch’s ECG app has saved the life of its owner. Will the Cupertino company enter into a partnership with the University of Waterloo to design a Stress Level app? No one really knows, but it is rumored thatsuch a feature could be integrated into the new AirPods the company.
Source : Borders
