Improved Sleep Tracking

One of the new features that made last year’s watchOS 7 update more significant was the addition of Sleep tracking. The debut of a new Sleep app allowed a user to wear their Apple Watch to bed, where it would track information like heart rate and hours of sleep.

With watchOS 8, Apple is expanding that with a new metric to track your respiratory rate while you’re sleeping, in the form of breaths per minute.

Since a person’s respiratory rate should normally be fairly consistent when they’re sleeping, changes in this could indicate a problem, and this will be tracked in the Health app. An active notification will also be shown whenever a significant change is identified.