A future Apple Watch could get a new life-saving feature, and one completely unrelated to the heart disorder headlines you may have seen in the past.
Apple has filed a patent detailing ways to detect if a person may be drowning, as spotted by Wareable.
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 do you discern between bad swimming technique and someone drowning? “Irregular underwater behaviour detection,” is what Apple calls it.
Several factors contribute to this, including the one you’d probably guess — using the Apple Watch’s motion sensors to algorithmically separate swimming and a person trying to attract action or in distress.
One diagram in the filing also shows blood oxygenation and heart rate factoring into the equation. An increase in heart rate and a decrease in blood oxygenation clear can be clear signs of a problem in this context.
The summary describes the feature as “a wearable device used as a digital pool attendant.”
This system is not just about a person drowning, but could also be used to alert nearby devices or people of someone suffering from a heart attack, or of a child who heads into deep water when they are not meant to.
The patent describes this as a relatively “cost-effective solution” compared to more conventional methods, such as camera-based safety systems that also may not be suitable for all environments, including “natural pools.”
A patent filing is never a particularly good guide as to what may be coming up next in technology available to actual consumers. But this implementation of a safety feature does represent a fairly natural transition from what Apple has put into the Apple Watch series recently.
In 2022, the Apple Watch gained Crash Detection, designed to tell when someone wearing the watch has been involved in a car crash.
It’s 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.
