Wear an Apple Watch? Get active, be healthy, win prizes, says Apple
Apple Watch is ten years old. To mark the moment, Apple has announced a special activity challenge with a bunch of awards for those of us who manage to go the distance, or at least get from couch to a couple of K.
What’s the challenge?
On April 24, Apple Watch users are encouraged to close their Activity rings to earn a special Global Close Your Rings Day limited-edition award, along with animated stickers for Messages.
Users who close all three Activity rings will earn a limited-edition award, plus 10 animated stickers and an animated badge for Messages.
To celebrate Global Close Your Rings Day, customers can obtain a special pin inspired by the award. Customers can pick up a pin at Apple Store locations worldwide starting April 24, while supplies last.
What Apple said
“Apple Watch has changed the way people think about, monitor, and engage with their fitness and health. A decade ago, we introduced Activity rings — and since then, Apple Watch has grown to offer an extensive set of features designed to empower every user,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer.
“People write to us almost every day sharing how Apple Watch has made a difference in their life, from motivating them to move more throughout the day, to changing the trajectory of their health.”
Being active is good for you
Announcing the challenge, Apple shared data contributed by more than 140,000 participants in the Apple Heart and Movement Study, which identified positive associations between the closure of Activity rings and aspects of sleep, heart health, and mental wellbeing. This is consistent across all ages and genders, and seem to show stunning results:
Relative to people who infrequently closed their Activity rings, people who closed their rings most of the time were:
- 48 percent less likely to experience poor sleep quality.
- 73 percent less likely to experience elevated resting heart rate levels.
- 57 percent less likely to report elevated stress.
A recently published validation summary shares highlights of the methodologies and underlying hardware and software technologies of Apple Watch that measure heart rate, estimate calories burned, and inform associated fitness and heart health data, with machine learning models developed using data from hundreds of thousands of hours of studies.
Of course, combined with Apple’s recent news on how it wants to train its models using user data, the chance for even more effective AI-driven healthcare seems just a couple of activity rings away.
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