The first stories that the Apple Watch could probably also save lives came a few months after the launch of Apple’s smartwatch: At the time, a boy had an unusually high heart rate after training, so his school doctor sent him to the hospital. It turned out to be absolutely right and timely because the boy was suffering from a rare, severe form of rhabdomyolysis – a breakdown of muscle fibers. Since then, the news has not stopped, how the Apple Watch is saving the lives of its wearers.

Most dramatic are the reports of rescued people who have fallen violently, lost consciousness, and whose watch itself then called emergency services. The causal link between the Apple Watch’s functions and lifesaving is clear here: the people in such stories are athletic and mobile, an accident can happen to anyone, but no one is insured against it. Without the timely emergency call triggered by the Apple Watch, the protagonists would either: lost too much bloodor frozen to death, or died of bruises to the head after a fractured skull.

The effectiveness of this feature can be confirmed by the author of these lines: I train in a dance group every week, we jump and jump all the time. One time, however, a participant put her foot down a bit unhappily, causing me to fall quite heavily. The Apple Watch immediately reported with the warning tone: “You seem to have fallen”. If I hadn’t turned off the warning, the watch would have called the ambulance after 30 seconds.

If you are over 55 when you set up the Apple Watch, fall detection will be turned on automatically, you don’t need to do anything here. Your Apple Watch (Series 4 and above) detects falls and alerts the doctor if you don’t move for more than a minute after the fall. Are you between 18 and 55 years old, you need to manually enable fall detection on Apple Watch: under “Settings – Emergency call SOS – Fall detection”.

If desired, the fall detection can only be activated during training. However, we recommend the “Always on” setting. Note that disabling auto-lock also affects fall detection. If the auto-lock is turned off, no emergency call will be made if the watch detects a fall. The watch can now make international emergency calls, but that’s fine an Apple Watch Series 6 required. You need the clock for that configure for mobilenot all regions and countries are available for the feature yet.

The kid in our first story must have played with his Apple Watch Series 1 or 0 quite a bit because he proactively discovered that his heart rate was too high for his resting state. As of watchOS 5.2 in the spring of 2019, Apple has automated this: the watch sends itself a notification if the heart rate does not match the activity being performed (is too high or too low) or if an irregular heart rhythm is detected. One such proactive report turned out to be a heart attack in an unsuspecting woman. In addition, after the confirmed heart attack, the doctors continued to monitor the woman and found a blockage in the left coronary artery.

Our readers also confirm the effectiveness of such reports: having a resting heart rate of 120 beats per minute and a subsequent EKG a man from North Rhine-Westphalia for atrial fibrillation pointed out. In this case, a stroke could still be prevented.

Go to the Watch app on your iPhone and go to the “Heart” setting at the bottom. In addition to a possible ECG app (from Apple Watch 4), you will find below in the: Show two settings for “High heart rate”, Apple recommends setting a limit of 110 BMP here, and for “Low heart rate” (40 BMP).

Coinciding with the release of the ECG app in Europe in March 2019, Apple introduced an irregular heart rhythm notification. This has already led to countless stories about how Apple Watch users initially thought the notification was an error and wanted to send the watch in, until they finally went to the doctor “just in case”, such as most recently a healthy middle-aged man from Germany. Result: hospitalization and possibly surgery because serious illnesses were diagnosed.

This is in the same window as the high and low heart rate notifications: in the Watch app on iPhone, under the Heart tab. You don’t have to set any values ​​here, just slide the slider to the right and activate the notification.

The stories of people being saved by the Apple Watch read so dramatically because some of them refer to acute illnesses that can lead to death in such a short time. It is therefore recommended that you turn on all possible heart notifications that your Apple Watch allows (see above). But also SOS notifications your own current emergency pass can save livesbecause then the doctors know immediately whether they have a diabetes patient, an allergy sufferer, etc. in front of them.

Not so spectacular, but important nonetheless, are the trends in cardiovascular health. Because before all the disturbing news about atrial fibrillation and high heart rate comes out, you can prevent them by doing something for your heart, which is eating healthy and exercising ( WHO recommends 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, or 70 minutes of vigorous exercise in the same amount of time). (macworld)