In recent years, smartwatches have gone far beyond just telling the time or tracking steps. These little gadgets on our wrists are becoming powerful health tools, quietly monitoring our bodies and sometimes even alerting us to serious medical issues before we realize something’s wrong. From tracking heart rate and sleep patterns to measuring blood oxygen levels, smartwatches are helping people stay more in tune with their health than ever before.
Take Amanda Faulkner’s story, for example. Amanda, a consultant psychiatrist from New Zealand, was feeling unusually tired and hot one summer, but she just put it down to the heat or maybe perimenopause. She was busy with over 60 patients and didn’t think much of it. But her new Apple Watch kept sending alerts that her resting heart rate was way higher than normal, jumping from her usual 55 beats per minute up into the 90s.
