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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1513481
We Might See New Health Features on the Apple Watch X With the extra room, Apple might finally be ready to add other features to the Apple Watch. While the company has added new features every year, the health features — which are one of the reasons why people choose the Apple Watch — have been mostly stale since the Apple Watch Series 6 added a blood oxygen sensor. While last year’s Apple Watch Series 8 added a body temperature sensor, it’s not as useful to as broad a range of people as other health features; the new sensor is primarily intended for predicting women’s reproductive cycles in the Cycle Tracking app. Fortunately, that might change with the Apple Watch X. While we don’t exactly know which features the company would add, we already have a pretty good guess. For starters, there have been rumors about a blood pressure sensor since 2019 that would use infrared light to detect your current blood pressure in a few moments. While Apple has reportedly struggled with making it accurate enough to produce specific numbers — rumors say it scrapped the sensor for the Apple Watch Series 6 — more recent reports say that the company has given up on precision and will settle for algorithms that can simply let you know when your numbers are outside of a normal range, prompting you to take a reading with a traditional blood pressure machine or seek medical attention. There are also rumors that Apple is working on a blood glucose monitor, which would literally change the game for the 37 million people in the US who have diabetes. Unfortunately, though, Apple is still in the early stages of this technology, and accuracy is very important for something like this, so we’re very unlikely to see it for the Apple Watch X launch. Still, one or both of these features would definitely make the Apple Watch the go-to option for many of us, so hopefully we’ll see them once the “Apple Watch X” launches.