DeepHeart AI IDs sleep apnea, hypertension via Apple Watch

Your Apple Watch can tell if you have hypertension or sleep apnea -- with the help of Cardiogram's deep neural network, DeepHeart, that is. The app-maker and the UCSF Health lab have conducted a study proving that wearables can suggest the presence of hypertension and sleep apnea with 82 percent and 90 percent accuracy, so long as they come equipped with heart rate sensors and accelerometers. According to Cardiogram, heart rate sensors can detect both conditions, because your body's autonomic nervous system connects your heart with the brain, stomach, esophagus, liver, intestines, pancreas and blood vessels. The company needed data to be able to train its AI to recognize heart rate patterns that denote the presence of the conditions, though, so it recruited 6,115 of its app's users to participate in an online study with the UCSF Health lab. Cardiogram managed to collect 30 billion sensor measurements composed of the subjects' heart rate and step counts, which it then fed to its AI.