New feature now available on Apple Watches in Canada

The latest Apple Watch health feature has finally arrived in Canada so now anyone with a supported watch can use it to make sure they don't have hypertension.

The feature works on the Apple Watch Series 9 and later and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. Unfortunately, the new Apple Watch SE from 2025 won't get the feature. It should be rolling out later today and you can then enable it in the Health app.

Apple decided to add this feature to the Apple Watch platform because it says that over a billion people worldwide suffer from hypertension, and around half of them don't even know it.

To check for this, the Apple Watch can monitor how your blood vessels respond to your heartbeat. It's not a full blood pressure monitor, but it can look for patterns over a 30-day period, and if it finds bad patterns, it will alert you.

Apple

If you get the alert, the Health app on your phone will ask you to log your blood pressure for seven days using a typical blood pressure cuff. Once this happens, an easy-to-use section will open up in the Health app to help you keep track of your measurements. Then, with all this data, the watch recommends going to your doctor to ask about more hypertension tests.

To figure all this out, the tech giant has validated this feature with the help of 2,000 people who participated in an Apple study. The feature joins other Apple Health features like Sleep Apnea Notifications from last year.