Apple Watch underwater
A future Apple Watch could get a new life-saving feature, and one completely unrelated to the heart disease headlines you may have seen in the past.
Apple has filed a patent detailing ways to detect if a person might be choking, as it detected Storeable.
The patent was filed in late March 2024 and details a form of software-meets-hardware intelligence that could be used to send an SOS message to selected contacts.
But how can you tell the difference between poor swimming technique and someone who is drowning? “Anomalous underwater behavior detection,” is what Apple calls it.
A number of factors contribute to this, including what you’d probably guess – using the Apple Watch’s motion sensors to algorithmically separate swimming and a person trying to attract action or being in danger.
A chart at archiving also shows blood oxygenation and heart rate factor into the equation. An increase in heart rate and a decrease in net oxygenation of the blood can be clear signs of a problem in this context.
The synopsis describes the feature as “a portable device used as a digital pool companion.”
This system isn’t just about a person drowning, but could also be used to alert nearby devices or people about someone having a heart attack or a child heading into deep water when they don’t want to.
The patent describes this as a relatively “cost-effective solution” compared to more conventional methods such as camera-based security systems which also may not be suitable for all environments, including “natural pools”.
A patent filing is never a particularly good guide to what may come next in technology available to actual consumers. But this implementation of a security feature represents a fairly natural transition from what Apple has recently put into the Apple Watch line.
In 2022, the Apple Watch gained Crash Detection, designed to show when someone wearing the watch has been involved in a car accident.
It was made possible thanks to the fidelity of the Apple Watch’s motion sensor hardware, which can detect the high acceleration involved in such a situation. This in turn allows Apple to separate such events from Fall Detection, which came to the Apple Watch in 2018.
