Apple’s watchOS 11 is now available for download, offering users sleep apnea notifications for the first time.
The public version of watchOS 11 has been released in multiple beta builds, with most of the new features focused on health and fitness.
Perhaps the most interesting of these is sleep apnea detection, a feature that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved for use by Apple, which the company announced at a September 9 event. Apple says it uses the watch’s accelerometer to detect small movements of the wrist during sleep that are associated with disruptions in normal breathing patterns (the metric Apple uses for this is called dyspnoea). Apple then uses this data to notify users if it detects signs of sleep apnea.
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The feature is available on Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra, and is available in more than 150 countries and regions, including the United States and the European Union.
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Apple’s new watchOS 10 also brings a new app called Vitals, which gives users an overview of their daily fitness, as well as a metric called training load (visible in the Activity and Vitals apps ), this metric shows how a user’s movement affects their health.
Other new features include more activity ring customization options, more personalized Smart Stacking, a new Tide app for users who prefer open water activities, and more information for users who log their pregnancies in the Health app.
New dials: Redesigned photo dials, flux and reflections.
Credit: Apple
There are also new features that have nothing to do with health or fitness, such as a translation app available on the watch for the first time, and three new watch faces: a redesigned photo watch face, a Flux watch face, and a reflective surface.
If you have an iPhone Xs or later running iOS 18, the new watchOS 11 is available as a free upgrade for Apple Watch Series 6 and later.
