How the Apple Watch saved my life

Have you ever almost died? I used to think my health was infallible, but one moment in November 2020 turned my life upside down and made me realize how important technology is in our daily lives.

Everyone has probably heard stories about how the Apple Watch can save lives, but I never thought that one day I would call on Apple's wearable to save my life. As it turned out, this happened repeatedly and it played a key role in helping me rebuild my life.

Many features of the Apple Watch are rightly praised for their life-saving abilities, and many of them have proven to be a blessing for me. The Apple Watch has repeatedly saved my life.

An encounter with death at the age of 33

To understand the Apple Watch's impact on my life, you must first understand my health history. November 27, 2020 is a day I will never forget. It was 3 a.m., I had just returned to San Francisco and woke up with my heart pounding. I immediately thought I was having a heart attack, and it turns out I was right. Just a few days before my birthday, my life was turned upside down by the first serious illness I had ever experienced.

I had seen this coming for most of the year before. I had lost my father four months earlier and shortly afterward the stress began to cause heart palpitations. I had also been expecting it for years as both sides of my family have suffered from most serious health issues in the past. The precursors to all of these illnesses existed long before my own choices exacerbated the problems.

The heart attack was the start of a new journey for me in which health became a key part of my being. It took four days for me to undergo an angioplasty – a medical procedure in which a balloon-like stent is inserted into a blocked artery – and be discharged, and then began a long road to restoring my health, in which the Apple Watch played a crucial role role played.

The Apple Watch could have helped me much sooner

I've been using an Apple Watch for years and some features have kept me in much better shape. I have always found the activity rings in particular to be incredibly useful for maintaining my health. Until the pandemic in 2020, it motivated me to swim several times a week and always exceed my set goals.

When I lost my father months before the heart attack, I switched from the Apple Watch to an analog watch. My father loved his watches and this was a kind of tribute to his passion for Rado brand watches.

In hindsight, this was a decision I will regret for years to come, as I firmly believe that the Apple Watch would have warned me of my impending heart attack. As soon as I left the hospital, I purchased the (then) newest Apple Watch Series 6 and it became an integral part of my multi-year health journey rebuild.

How the Apple Watch repeatedly saved my life

If you've ever struggled with death, you know that the biggest challenge in recovery is the health anxiety caused by the invisible feeling of impending doom. Over the last decade of its wearable's lifespan, Apple has developed a number of health features designed to help with health emergencies. It's easy to dismiss these features, but I'm living proof that they're incredibly powerful.

I believe that health may be Apple's greatest contribution to humanity – a Sentiment that CEO Tim Cook agrees with – and while many features helped me recover, some proved crucial to my health.

The biggest of these is the medical ID card. Apple remains the only major technology company to automatically sync your medical records, and in at least two cases this has helped paramedics treat me in an emergency. A quick look at my wrist allowed them to see my health status, my emergency contacts and, most importantly, any medications I was taking. The latter prevented them from giving me emergency medication, which would have interacted with my heart medications and potentially stopped my heartbeat.

Part of recovering from a heart attack is cardiac rehabilitation, and during this time you'll also rebuild your muscles. For me, this meant rebuilding my entire musculoskeletal system, as I was no longer able to stand straight shortly after the heart attack. Fall detection is a highly praised feature of the Apple Watch and has proven to be a lifesaver. I fell twice and the Apple Watch immediately contacted emergency services while notifying my emergency contacts.

The Apple Watch is a great companion for chronic illnesses

Aside from its useful features in an emergency, there are many reasons why the Apple Watch is a great companion for people with chronic health problems like me. If you're like me and live thousands of miles away from your family, the Emergency Contacts feature makes it easy to notify your friends and family – no matter how far away they live – if the worst happens.

There are also a number of health features that I can rely on. Heart rate monitoring proved particularly useful. It's been almost four years since my heart attack, but until the Pixel Watch 3 came out earlier this year, I was still relying on heart rate monitoring as a guide to my heart's performance.

This is particularly useful when I'm sleeping, and my cardiologist used the heart rate monitoring data while I was sleeping to adjust my medications. One of these is a beta blocker, which is used to control and suppress your heart rate. However, it can often cause your heart rate to drop too low. In the first three months after my heart attack, this often happened overnight, and the Apple Watch data helped my medical team find the right dosage for me.

Other Apple Watch features can be particularly useful, although these could have been more effective for me. Blood oxygen monitoring is not particularly accurate, but it helps identify when you may be having breathing problems. The ECG app is a great way to perform a single-lead ECG, although it only provides one-twelfth of the data that a medical-grade ECG provides. So I quickly replaced it with a six-lead home ECG machine.

Apple's big influence on our health

In the years since my heart attack, Apple has made Apple Watch and Apple Health an important part of many people's health. New features have been added to provide a more holistic view of your health with a single device on your wrist.

WatchOS 8 added mindfulness, which I think is useful for combating anxiety. Fall detection has also been added during training and other training sessions such as Pilates. WatchOS 9 delivers custom workouts, better sleep insights and AFib tracking, helping millions of people with undetected atrial fibrillation worldwide. WatchOS 10 has improved mindfulness, exercise tracking, and medication reminders, which is especially useful if you take as many medications daily as I do.

WatchOS 11 was released a few weeks ago and has significantly improved the health suite. Sleep reports are improved and more helpful in identifying underlying health problems. This is related to Apple Watch Series 10's sleep apnea detection, which can now help you find out if you may be suffering from sleep apnea. It's particularly common in people with heart disease, and the ability to detect it is one of the reasons I found the Galaxy Watch Ultra so appealing. The Vitals app also provides a quick overview of overnight health metrics and can identify whether these results are typical or underlying something that requires further investigation.

Over the past four years, Apple Watch has been a blessing to my life and health and has saved my life several times. Many of the new Apple Health features weren't available during my heart attack recovery, but are designed to expand the life-saving features of Apple Watch. I'll probably always wear an Apple Watch – at least alongside the Pixel Watch 3 because of the lack of heart rate detection – especially because it has saved my life many times and will likely continue to do so for years to come.