I’m just back from visiting my mom in Memphis. She’s 85 and living alone. I insisted that if she was going to continue to do that, she needed to start wearing an Apple Watch. I’ve known for some time that it offered a number of biometric features, but I’d never really looked at it through the lens of a one-stop-shop for all things biometric.
My primary motivator for looking at the Series 11 watch was the fall detection feature. Back at Christmas my mother fell and I had to help her get up. That was very much on my mind. An additional concern has been her blood oxygenation level; while at the doctor during my visit, hers dropped to 87 percent.
With the sharing feature in the Apple Health app, I can check those stats, her average heart rate, a-fib events and can even see the results from an electrocardiogram. Should she experience any breathing disturbances, it will record those as well.
The more phone-like features, e.g. texting, I have zero interest in, which is why I thought I wasn’t interested in the watch as a category. In a way, its best features are its least flashy.
The Series 11 goes for $399 if you go for the GPS version with the aluminum case; they go up from there. If I were feeling a little splurgy, I’d get one just to ride with it.