Watching Over You

Apple’s new watch has heart-health and fall detectors and a hefty price tag.

- Peter Griffin

Could your wristwatch save your life? That’s the intriguing question thrown up by the new Apple Watch, which went on sale last month and is winning praise for the advanced health-tracking features it introduces.

The first Apple Watch was released in 2015, at the height of the fitness-tracker craze, when every second person you met seemed to have a Fitbit on their wrist. Apple decided to make a device that was more than a step counter and smaller screen to read iPhone text messages and emails on, and built an optical heart-rate sensor into the watch.

That allowed the wearer to keep an eye on their pulse, an important measure of your ticker’s ability to pump blood. Now, five versions of the watch later, the Apple Watch Series 4 takes heart-health monitoring to a new level.