Sources: Apple is planning to add health features, including a blood pressure monitor and thermometer to track fertility, to Watch as soon as 2022
Tech giant seeks to push past obstacles in adding health features on your wrist — Apple Inc. is working on new health-related features for its smartwatch …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple had already been testing sleep tracking for the Watch and working with Stanford and American Well on whether the device could detect common heart conditions. The planned blood-pressure, temperature and fertility features extend that health-monitoring arc from activity and sleep into more medically consequential signals.
The roadmap also shows the difficulty of that expansion: later coverage says accuracy problems pushed the blood-pressure monitor beyond the original target, while Apple subsequently continued to plan an elevated blood-pressure sensor and a paid health service.
First-order effects
- Apple’s Watch development effort shifts toward blood-pressure and temperature sensing, with fertility tracking built around the latter capability.
- Accuracy becomes an immediate gating factor for the blood-pressure feature, as reflected in the later reported delay of the monitor.
Second-order effects
- Apple’s health-feature roadmap creates a reason to connect Watch readings with the personal health-data work it had pursued with hospitals and lab-testing companies.
- The parallel exploration of temperature and posture features for AirPods positions Apple to spread health sensing across more than one wearable product.
Third-order effects
- If Apple can turn these sensors into dependable features, its wearable strategy shifts toward a broader health-data layer spanning Watch, AirPods, and iPhone-linked records.
- The reported delays indicate that accuracy validation, rather than feature announcements, will determine how quickly wrist-based health monitoring expands.
The trend: Consumer wearables are moving from activity tracking toward multi-device health sensing, with measurement accuracy setting the pace of adoption.