With the introduction of the latest sensors and ongoing releases of new designs, smartwatches have led the way for advancing the field of digital health.
Among the most dominant models on the market, is certainly the Apple Watch, which has now rolled out its series 9 smartwatch. The Apple Watch has always allowed users to closely monitor their health conditions, generating very useful data that has often helped to speed up or even improve the treatment provided by healthcare facilities.
The new design of the Apple Watch Series 9 will grant users the options to access and log their healthcare data, while also controlling the Watch using their index finger and thumb via blood flow sensors. The new Apple Watch has been released with a comprehensive set of features, including heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen detection, ECG readings, sleep tracking, fall detection, loud noise monitoring, and built-in temperature sensing, all of which were initially introduced in previous models.
Furthermore, it now incorporates a Crash Detection feature that utilizes the watch’s gyroscope, accelerometer, and an advanced sensor-fusion algorithm to identify severe car accidents. In the event of a crash, the Apple Watch promptly checks in with the user, and if no response is received within 10-seconds, emergency services are automatically alerted.
Thanks to the new features, users can interact with their health data by utilizing Siri’s health-related queries. This allows them to get data like their previous night’s sleep duration or their average heart rate while walking. Additionally, users have the option to verbally input information, including their weight, menstrual cycle data, and medication taken, a positive step forward for elderly care.
New features and improvements
With the advancement of technology and the introduction of artificial intelligence into the healthcare ecosystem, devices like the Apple Watch have significantly improved their accuracy. The Series 9, which features twice the brightness of the Series 8, includes a SiP S9 chip capable of storing and processing machine-learning tasks twice as fast as the previous version, all while providing a total battery life of 18 hours.
The Apple Watch introduces a feature called ‘double tap‘, which will allow users to answer, end a phone call or control the main buttons to play certain types of content.
“[The Series 9] features a magical new way to control your Watch with double tap, faster on-device Siri that lets you securely access health data, precision finding for iPhone and a brighter display, all enabled by the S9 SiP, our most powerful chip ever in an Apple Watch. And it’s Apple’s first-ever carbon-neutral product,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer.
With the release of the new Apple Watch, the Californian company also renewed its pledge to become a carbon-neutral company by 2030. In this regard, they stated that the Apple Watch uses renewable materials at every stage of product development and shipping, including the use of 100% recycled cobalt in the battery. This makes the Series 9 the first carbon-neutral product ever developed by Apple.
