health
Recent smartwatches added a feature that watches breathing patterns overnight to flag a common but often undiagnosed sleep disorder.
Sleep apnea is the condition these newer smartwatches are designed to help flag. The disorder involves repeated pauses or shallow moments in breathing during sleep, and by monitoring breathing patterns or blood oxygen fluctuations overnight, a watch can pick up on the kind of disrupted breathing rhythm that suggests a person may have the condition, though a formal diagnosis still requires a proper clinical sleep evaluation.
Color blindness is a vision condition unrelated to breathing or sleep, and a broken bone is a physical injury that would be diagnosed through imaging like an X-ray rather than overnight breathing monitoring; neither is something a smartwatch is built to detect.
Sleep apnea is notable for how often it goes undiagnosed for years, since its main symptoms happen while a person is asleep, making a passive, always-worn device well suited to catching a pattern the person would otherwise never notice.
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