Technology

Your Apple Watch might soon detect early pregnancy before you do

Its testing has shown up to 92% accuracy.

Turns out, your iPhone and Apple Watch could know you better than you think...

A new Apple supported study has revealed that artificial intelligence (AI) could now detect early signs of pregnancy with over 90% accuracy. 

A machine learning model called the Wearable Behaviour Model (WBM), pulls subtle behavioural changes from everyday data, like how much you're moving, sleeping, or how your heart's beating.

Instead of just crunching the usual data like heart rate or blood oxygen levels, Business Insider reports this AI it uses long-term behavioural patterns of the above, which are already processed by Apple’s algorithms.

That means, if you have disrupted sleep, changes in activity levels, even shifts in how you walk, all those little things might be giving you away.

The WBM was trained using a whopping 2.5 billion hours of data from more than 162,000 participants in the Heart and Movement Study

For pregnancy detection specifically, researchers created a custom dataset from 430 pregnancies and over 24,000 non-pregnant people under the age of 50, to determine the accuracy.

And the results are quite mind boggling, for me, at least.

The WBM could pick up early signs of pregnancy with 92% accuracy based on behaviour alone, backed by signals like heart rate variability and blood flow.

It’s not a replacement for a pregnancy test (those are still obviously the more accurate go-to), but researchers reckon this could pave the way for your watch and phone to become more helpful in the reproductive health space.

And it’s not just pregnancy. The AI showed results across 57 different health-related tasks, including spotting respiratory infections early and tracking whether people were consistent with their medications, like beta blockers.

So, your Apple Watch might soon go from counting your steps to suggesting you go out and buy a pregnancy test.