Patently Apple has covered a series of Apple patents relating to Apple's future health systems for monitoring blood pressure (01, 02, 03, 04 and 05) since 2020. Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that relates to systems and methods for hypertension monitoring, and more particularly, to hypertension monitoring using an Apple Watch.

Without proper diagnosis and treatment, hypertension (high blood pressure) can increase risk of health problems, such as stroke and heart attack. Hypertension often goes undetected because symptoms may not manifest for months or years. Even without symptoms, however, hypertension can damage the heart and blood vessels. Accordingly, providing users with an indication of hypertension can be useful to improve health.

Apple's invention covers systems and methods for monitoring for hypertension using a wearable device. The wearable device can include a motion and/or orientation sensor (e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope, inertia-measurement unit (IMU), etc.) and an optical sensor. The data from the sensors can be processed in the wearable device and/or by another device in communication with the wearable device to provide an early screening for undiagnosed hypertension. If the screening estimates undiagnosed hypertension for a user, the user can then be notified to seek a proper hypertension diagnosis.

The hypertension monitoring can include a first stage to estimate one or more short-term hypertension scores or parameters. The short-term hypertension scores/parameters can be correlated with blood pressure. In some examples, the short-term hypertension scores/parameters can include a systolic blood pressure score (or parameters) and a diastolic blood pressure score (or parameters). The hypertension monitoring can also include a second stage to estimate a long-term hypertension score using accumulated short-term scores/parameters (e.g., for a threshold period of time or a threshold number of short-term hypertension scores/parameters) to estimate hypertension.

According to Apple, "short-term" hypertension scores/parameters can represent hypertension scores/parameters computed from a segment of input data from one or more sensors, each segment corresponding to a first period (e.g., 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, etc.).

The short-term hypertension scores/parameters can correlate with the blood pressure for the segment (e.g., of including data acquired in a first period). As used herein, a "long-term" hypertension score can represent a hypertension score computed from input data acquired over the course of a second period (e.g., days, a week, weeks, a month, etc.), which can correlate with the blood pressure for the second period.

In this way, "short-term" and "long-term" reflect the relative differences between the first period and second period. The second period used for the "long-term" hypertension score can be orders of magnitude longer than the first period used for the "short-term" hypertension score/parameters.

Apple's patent FIG. 1A below points to the key device for measuring hypertension; FIG. 2 illustrates an example block diagram for hypertension monitoring; FIG. 3. Illustrates and example process for hypertension monitoring.

Apple's patent FIGS. 4A and 4B illustrate example block diagrams of short-term hypertension score generators.

Apple's patent FIGS. 5A and 5B illustrate example block diagrams of long-term hypertension score generators

For more details, review Apple's patent application number 20210375473.

Considering that this is a patent application, the timing of such a product to market is unknown at this time.