iOS 14 code reveals new Apple Watch features, including blood oxygen detection

Enlarge / The Apple Watch series 5. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

By digging through leaked iOS 14 code snippets it claims to have acquired, 9to5Mac says it has uncovered a number of details about the new features and improvements coming to the Apple Watch later this year when iOS 14 and watchOS 7 ship. Among them are a new blood oxygen detection feature, further evidence of sleep tracking, a number of new Watch face-related features, and the ability for a parent to manage a child's Watch from the parent's iPhone.

Like the electrocardiogram (ECG) feature introduced in a previous model, blood oxygen detection would be meant to help users preempt medical crises like cardiac arrest. The Watch will notify a user if their blood oxygen levels fall below a healthy threshold, at which time the user is at risk for dangerous health events. It does not seem clear whether this feature will be enabled by new sensors exclusive to the Apple Watch series 6 or if it will work on existing Watch hardware.

This feature would seek to replace yet another unwieldy, specialized medical device and consolidate various aspects of tracking the user's health on the Watch. Before making judgments about the feature, though, it would be best to wait and hear from medical experts. The Watch's ECG feature helped some users tackle serious health crisis, but some cardiologists warned that it wasn't an adequate solution for everyone. To that point, 9to5Mac says it discovered that Apple plans to improve the ECG feature to be more accurate between heart rates of 100 and 120 beats per minute.

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