Media report · AI-ASSISTED BRIEF

Google AI system detects hypertension from consumer smartwatches without cuff calibration, published in Nature

Report publication 2026-11-07 · YYSI publication 2026-11-07

According to IT Home, Google published research in Nature on AI-PPG-ACC-HTN, a multimodal AI system that passively detects persistent hypertension using ordinary consumer smartwatches without cuff calibration. Instead of estimating single blood-pressure readings, it aggregates multi-day physiological features from a self-supervised 1D-CNN pretrained on over 490,000 hours of unlabeled data. In a 196-participant, five-center prospective trial against 24-hour ambulatory monitoring, confirmatory testing reached 96.7% positive predictive value. Google says the work underpins a blood-pressure trends feature in its health app.