Samsung's latest Galaxy Watches will soon get another major health monitoring tool... in one country
Whether or not you consider them overall better than the Apple Watch Series 9 and Series 8, this year's Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 family and last year's Galaxy Watch 5 lineup are without a doubt among the best smartwatches in the world when it comes to monitoring the health and tracking the physical activity of their wearers.
Depending on where you live, you might be able to take advantage of a whole bunch of state-of-the-art technologies on these Wear OS-powered bad boys ranging from ECG (electrocardiogram) detection to blood pressure supervision and irregular heart rhythm notification in addition to your more run-of-the-mill capabilities like fall detection, blood oxygen tracking, and body composition analysis.
Believe it or not, Samsung is planning to pay even closer attention to your wellness starting "early next year" by adding an aptly named sleep apnea feature to the already expansive Health Monitor toolset. Unfortunately, this will only happen in Korea, where the local Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has seemingly approved the functionality for "pre-diagnosis" use, and there's currently no word on when (or if) other countries and regions will follow suit.
Even in Samsung's homeland, the feature comes with a number of asterisks, exclusions, and footnotes, targeting only users who haven't already been diagnosed with sleep apnea and merely aiming to identify possible signs of this "common yet serious" medical condition in its moderate to severe form.
Once that happens, you will obviously still need to see a doctor for a professional and firm diagnosis, as well as appropriate treatment, and if you suspect that you might be suffering of sleep apnea despite what your wearable device is telling you... you could be right, as not "every case" will be detected by the new feature.
Even with all of this in mind, Samsung clearly deserves quite a bit of praise for constantly trying to make its high-end smartwatches better in truly meaningful ways. Seeing as how obstructive sleep apnea apparently affects no less than 25 percent of men and 10 percent of women in the US, the Galaxy Watch 5 and Galaxy Watch 6 will soon gain the potential of making a lot of lives better... in Korea.
Sleep apnea can cause disruptions in oxygen supply, poor rest, and health complications like hypertension, cardiac disorder, stroke, or cognitive disorder, often going undiagnosed and untreated due to, well, happening when one sleeps and generally leaving no visible traces when you're awake. That's clearly something you'd want to know about and try to remedy as early as possible, which is why it would definitely be nice to see the FDA approve this feature for stateside use at some point in the relatively near future.
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