Samsung recently sent out a notice to Galaxy Watch owners in the US saying that it is removing the vascular load monitoring tool from its wearable lineup, replacing it with a feature that checks blood pressure periodically.
Vascular Load, if you don"t know, is a feature that tracks the overall stress your blood vessels experience throughout the night, using the BioActive optical heart rate sensor to read photoplethysmogram waveforms while you"re sleeping to calculate vascular stiffness.
The feature was first debuted back in 2024, acting as an experimental option for the Galaxy Watch 7 and Galaxy Watch Ultra, with a more fleshed-out release arriving on the Galaxy Watch 8 and Galaxy Watch 8 Classic last year.
Because every human is different, the wearable sensor requires a baseline calibration period to learn your body"s specific arterial patterns before first-time use. Wearing the watch to bed for at least three nights out of a 14-day window allows the health software to establish your average vascular properties.
After this first-time-use calibration, regular sleep tracking will record metrics overnight and make your Vascular Load score change as your stress levels fluctuate. The Samsung Health app can grab these data points and use them to help you identify negative habits, providing lifestyle recommendations to adjust your sleep schedules and exercise routines.
According to Samsung"s notice, starting with Samsung Health 7.0 and the One UI 9 Watch update, the vascular stress metric will completely disappear, leaving previous records gone from the Health app in the United States. Users can download their historical tracking information by navigating to settings and downloading their personal data before the software update wipes the storage clean.
The Blood pressure trend feature that"s replacing the Vascular Load feature can only work after you"ve calibrated the watch by taking readings with an inflatable blood pressure cuff every twenty-eight days to ensure sensor accuracy.
Samsung said users in the US should expect the vascular load metric to vanish, leaving the feature gone later this month when the One UI 9 watch update rolls out.