An Apple Watch can detect hypertension, sleep apnea and abnormal heart rhythms with the help of a trained deep-learning algorithm called DeepHeart, health startup Cardiogram and the University of California in San Francisco said in new study.

The algorithm helped the Apple Watch detect abnormal heart rhythms with 97 percent accuracy, sleep apnea with 90 percent accuracy and hypertension with 82 percent accuracy, website Tech Crunch reported.

The algorithm could be used with other over-the-counter wearables like Fitbit as well, Tech Crunch added.

"They basically all have the same technology built inside," Cardiogram's cofounder Johnson Hsieh told TechCrunch. "The idea here is that by screening continuously you would identify people with hypertension who might not know they have it. And then you'd guide them through the appropriate final diagnosis, which would be through a blood pressure cuff and then treatment."

ZDNet.com reported that the Cardiogram/UCSF study followed more than 6,000 subjects, some of whom had diagnosed hypertension and sleep apnea. The tech website said the research hopes to inspire more business development around the use of wearables within preventive medicine.

"When we talk about artificial intelligence in medicine, we often debate whether machines will replace tasks doctors do today," Cardiogram cofounder Brandon Ballinger said in a blog post. "A more tantalizing possibility is performing tasks doctors can't — using large data sets, and modern computational tools like deep learning, to recognize patterns too subtle for any human to discern.

"… Over the next few months, you'll see us start translating these research results into actual care, as well as expand to new conditions like pre-diabetes and diabetes," Ballinger added.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said about 75 million American adults suffer from high blood pressure, nearly one in every three adults. The CDC said another one in three American adults have prehypertension, blood pressure numbers that are higher than normal but not yet in the high blood pressure range.

According to the American Sleep Apnea Association, an estimated 22 million Americans suffer from sleep apnea, with 80 percent of the cases of moderate and severe obstructive sleep apnea going undiagnosed.

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