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The new Apple Watch can be summed up in two words: blood oxygen.
The ability to measure oxygen saturation in the blood, a general indicator of well-being, is the biggest new feature of the Apple Watch Series 6, which was introduced this week and will be available on Friday. (Otherwise, the watch is not that different from last year’s Apple Watch.) The role is particularly current with the coronavirus, because some critically ill Covid-19 patients have had low blood oxygen levels.
But how useful is this feature for all of us?
I had one day to test the new $ 399 Apple Watch to measure my blood oxygen level. The process was simple: you open the blood oxygen app on the device, hold your wrist steady, and press the Home button. After 15 seconds, during which a sensor on the back of the watch measures your blood oxygen level by illuminating your wrist, it displays your reading. In three tests, my blood oxygen level was between 99 and 100 percent.
He was not quite sure what to do with this information. So I asked two medical experts about the new feature. Both were cautiously optimistic about its potential benefits, especially for research. The ability to constantly monitor blood oxygen levels with some degree of precision, they said, could help people uncover symptoms of health conditions like sleep apnea.
“Continuous data logging can be really interesting to see trends,” said Cathy A. Goldstein, a sleep physician at the University of Michigan Sleep Medicine Clinic, who has researched the data collected by Apple Watches.
But for most people who are relatively healthy, measuring blood oxygen on a daily basis may be a lot more information than we need. Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said he was concerned that blood oxygen readings could make people anxious and lead to unnecessary testing.
“It can be positive and negative,” he warned. “It could keep people out of doctors’ offices and at home and give them peace of mind, but it could also cause a lot of anxiety.”
This is important to remember, as smartwatches get new health monitoring features that give us information about ourselves that we have to figure out how to use. When the Apple Watch Series 4 introduced an electric heart sensor for people to take EKGs in 2018, it was helpful for people with known heart conditions to monitor their health, but doctors cautioned that it was also a novelty that should not be used to jump to conclusions. or for people to self-diagnose heart attacks or other conditions.
And so here we are again.
What You Should Know About Blood Oxygen Levels
A healthy person will generally have blood oxygen levels between 90 and 90 degrees. When people have health conditions like lung disease, sleep disorders, or respiratory infections, levels can drop from the 60s to the 90s, Dr. Goldstein said.
If you buy the Apple Watch and have access to information about your blood oxygen levels all the time, it is important to have a framework for thinking about the data. Most importantly, you should have a primary care physician with whom you can share the measurements so that you can place them in the context of your overall health, such as your age and pre-existing conditions, Dr. Goldstein said.
Relatively healthy people can do some practical things with data to improve their well-being. If your workouts are falling apart and your blood oxygen reading is lower as well, make a few small adjustments to behaviors like your diet and see if that makes a difference.
But when it comes to medical advice and diagnosis, always consult a doctor. If you notice a large drop in your blood oxygen level, it is not necessarily a reason to panic, and you should speak with your doctor to decide whether to investigate. And if you have symptoms of illness, such as a fever or cough, a normal blood oxygen reading shouldn’t be a reason to skip the conversation with a medical professional, Dr. Goldstein said.
Let a medical expert, not your watch, create the action plan.
Monitoring blood oxygen may be more helpful for people who are known to have health problems, Dr. Weiss said. For example, if someone with a history of heart failure sees lower levels of oxygen saturation in their blood during exercise, that information could be shared with a doctor, who could then modify the treatment plan.
The information could also be used to determine whether a sick person should go to the hospital. “If a patient called me and said, ‘I have Covid and my oxygen level is at 80 percent,’ I would say, ‘Go to the hospital,’” Dr. Weiss said.
So why should I care?
In the end, health data alone is not immediately useful, and we have to decide how to make the best use of the information. Apple doesn’t recommend what to do or how to feel about the information, just like a bathroom scale doesn’t tell you you’re overweight and gives you a diet plan.
If you find that the data makes you more anxious, you can simply turn the feature off, Dr. Goldstein said.
But even if blood oxygen measurement sounds nifty today, it’s important to keep an open mind about how new health monitoring technologies could benefit us in the future. Both Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Weiss pointed to sleep apnea as an area where laptops could benefit people. The condition, which causes breathing problems during sleep, affects millions of Americans, but most people never know they have it.
It’s kind of cheat 22. If you had symptoms of sleep apnea, which include lower blood oxygen levels, your doctor will order a test. But you probably won’t detect symptoms while you sleep, so a test will never be ordered.
Apple Watch will periodically measure your blood oxygen level in the background, even when you’re asleep. So if we collect data about ourselves while we sleep, we might discover something unknown about ourselves, or not.
“Until we start doing it, we don’t know if this information can be valuable,” Dr. Goldstein said.
