Last week, I had a front-row seat (well, technically, a thirteenth-row seat) to watch Apple unveil its latest offerings for the iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch product lines. With what felt like every tech reporter on the planet filling the seats of Steve Jobs Theater, from niche bloggers to Marques Brownlee, I was surrounded by folks who know a lot more about the intricate tech specs of these bleeding-edge products than I do. (At one point, the theater erupted with applause when it was announced that iPhone 17 will ship with a base storage of 256 gigabytes. I clapped along, figuring this was important.)

As a health and wellness writer, I was more excited about a feature that was announced moments earlier—this one for Apple Watch, which will be available to order this Friday, Sept. 19. Users can now turn on notifications for hypertension, otherwise known as high blood pressure. This might just be Apple’s greatest contribution to the health tech space of the past decade. Here’s why.

Earlier this year, the American Heart Association announced that heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, due in no small part to rising cases of high blood pressure—one of the main risk factors for heart attack, stroke, and also kidney failure, affecting approximately 1.3 billion adults globally.

“In the United States, by the time you get to middle age or so, 30 to 40 percent of people have hypertension,” says Srihari S. Naidu, MD, FACC, FAHA, FSCAI, professor of medicine at New York Medical College and president of the New York Chapter of the American College of Cardiology.