Apple Watch saved my life' says woman who needed a blood transfusion

Apple Watch heart beat (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

A woman posted to a forum to say an Apple Watch saved her life.
The watch noticed an unusually high heart rate.
She was suffering from a low hemoglobin count and needed a blood transfusion.

The ability of Apple Watch to save lives is something that we wouldn't have believed when the very first one was announced in 2015. But five years later it seems like a month can't go by without a story about a watch alerting someone about an undiagnosed problem. The latest involves a woman who needed a blood transfusion but didn't know it yet.

According to BabyCenter forum member "Crispynoodles," her Apple Watch alerted her to an unusually high heart rate. Around three times its usual 55 beats-per-minute, in fact.

Last week I felt dizzy and my Apple Watch alerted me that my heart rate was unusually high. Like, 158. I'm usually around 55/60. This happened a few more times and chalked it up to anxiety.

But there was more to it than a bout of anxiety, and when the Apple Watch wearer made an appointment to have some blood work done, she found out exactly what was wrong. And what needed to be done to correct it.

I made an appointment with my dr who ordered bloodwork. Bloodwork comes back and my hemoglobin is in the deadly range. It's a 5.2 and anything 7 or below is life threatening.im at the Hospital now getting a blood transfusion for the first time in my life.

It's possible that this need for a transfusion would have gone unnoticed for a longer period of time if the Apple Watch hadn't noticed something wasn't right. And according to "Crispynoodles," she didn't even want the thing in the first place.

To think, I was opposed to getting an Apple watch but hubby didn't know what else to get me for Xmas, so I guess totally worth it right?

Still, all's well that ends well.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.