Apple gets official approval for watch feature that can spot potentially fatal problem

September 12, 2025

Apple has received official approval for one of the headline features of its new watches: the ability to sense how hard your heart is beating.

The new hypertension feature is designed to spot when people have dangerously high blood pressure (hypertension). Unlike some tools, it doesn’t work by way of a cuff that squeezes the arm, but instead can detect signs of the condition using data collected by the watch’s heart rate sensor.

Hypertension is the leading modifiable risk factor for heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease, Apple said, and it affects somewhere in the region of 1.3 billion adults around the world. But it is often not diagnosed because it requires special equipment to spot, and it can be easily missed. Independent