Hit 50 and people start referring to the next decade as ‘sniper’s alley’, the implication being that if something bad is going to get you, it’ll take the shot then. Apple, ever the opportunist, has clearly clocked this, and its latest watch comes with a new trick: passive hypertension detection.
The twist? High blood pressure isn’t just a middle-aged concern. In elite sport it lurks, largely unseen, in strength-based and large-body disciplines. The likely targets are rugby forwards, NFL linemen, heavyweight rowers – and add in hammer throwers, Greco-Roman wrestlers and the odd sumo for good measure.
The condition is easily missed: stress, travel and competition can disguise it, and regular monitoring at walking pace is rarely built into training. If athletes are diagnosed, they face the added headache that some of the frontline medications are either banned by WADA or kill performance outright.
This is why Apple’s Ultra 3 feels significant. We launched The Sports Technology Awards in 2014 and back then, wearables were ‘The Thing’. However, soon after the market turned very cookie cutter; a little smaller, slightly pinker, marginally more waterproof… even Nike threw in the towel.
Fast forward and the landscape has matured. The public loves living by numbers, whether that’s sleep scores, sugar spikes, vertical feet skied, kilometres run or golf pars. But Apple’s new move is more than lifestyle titbits: it’s the first mainstream step towards always-on blood pressure screening, validated with big datasets and clinical trials.
This means that coaches and medical teams of elite performers could soon be tracking vascular health alongside VO₂ max and lactate, normalizing proactive hypertension management before it ends careers… or worse.
The elephant in the locker room remains the ownership of biometric data (see Leader 28 Sept 2023) but, for now, Apple has nudged wearables a notch closer to clinical-grade athlete monitoring – and its competition needs to play catch up, fast.
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