DeepHeart AI Detects Hypertension, Sleep Apnea Using Apple Watch
A new app for the Apple Watch, and other watches from Android Wear, Garmin and Fitbit, can now tell users if they have sleep apnea or hypertension. A new software called DeepHeart comes with its own Artificial Intelligence neural network and can point out signs of blood pressure and sleeping problems with as much as 90 percent accuracy.
The new software is the brainchild of Cardiogram and their research into deep neural networks, special software algorithms that form a large base of Artificial Intelligence solutions.
The company, along with the University of California, San Francisco health lab, have recently conducted a study using the new DeepHeart app. The team found that, with the help of the newer heart rate sensors and accelerometers in the current generation of smart wearables, the DeepHeart software can accurately suggest signs of sleep apnea or hypertension.
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The results were very impressive — DeepHeart managed to identify hypertension with 82 percent accuracy and sleep apnea with 90 percent. With a sample size of 6,115, Cardiogram has a good argument for advocating for more research into AI and smart wearables like the Apple Watch for medical diagnosis.
It's something that addresses a very widespread problem worldwide, too, as Engadget points out. As many as one out of five people with hypertension are undiagnosed, according to estimates from the World Health Organization, and they are at risk of developing heart disease if they don't get access to the right medical intervention.
Along the same lines, a huge proportion of people go to sleep without knowing they have sleep apnea. That's about 80 percent of people living with a disorder that can disrupt their breathing, especially when they are asleep.
As is, Cardiogram has some way to go towards convincing the medical community at large to adopt their approach, which they started going into when they first trained an AI system to detect the early signs of a stroke. Fortunately, it's just a matter of replicating their positive results in a peer-reviewed clinical trial over the coming months.
