Pulse: Send Your Heartbeat

Now reads a heartbeat from a photograph of a paper EKG. If a hospital strip is all that survives of someone, it can still be something you hold.

They don't just read that you're thinking of them. They feel your heart beating.

Record six seconds of your real heartbeat on Apple Watch and send it in Messages. It arrives as something they can hold in their hand — your rhythm, your pace, the way your heart actually beats right now.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Open Pulse on your Apple Watch and record for six seconds.
2. It appears on your iPhone, ready to name and keep.
3. Send it in Messages. They tap once and feel it.

FOR THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU

Different cities. A night shift. A deployment. A child at camp. The hour before surgery, when "thinking of you" isn't quite enough.

Some people keep a heartbeat and never send it at all — a parent's, a partner's — and play it in the dark years later. Pulse is built to hold those just as carefully.

NOT A GENERIC BUZZ

Every heartbeat is genuinely yours. Pulse reads your heart rate on Apple Watch and your own heart-rate variability — how irregular your heart is, which is different for everyone — so two people at the same pulse don't feel the same.

Each beat is shaped like a real one: the deep "lub" and the lighter "dub", the pause between, and the way a fast heart hits harder than a resting one.

Hold it, loop it, and let the screen fade to black while it keeps going.

FROM A PAPER EKG

If you have a strip from a hospital — an EKG printout — Pulse can read the beats from a photograph of it. Fill the frame with the sheet and the rhythm that was recorded that day becomes something you can hold.

Pulse reads only when the heart beat. It doesn't interpret the trace and it isn't a medical tool.

For some people this is the only heartbeat that exists of someone. It never needed an Apple Watch, and it doesn't need one now.

WHAT YOU NEED

Recording your own heartbeat needs an Apple Watch — that's where the sensor is. Everything else works on iPhone alone: importing from an EKG printout, receiving a heartbeat someone sends you, holding it, and keeping it.

YOUR HEARTBEATS STAY YOURS

There is no Pulse account and no Pulse server. Your recordings are stored on your iPhone, with a copy in your own private iCloud so a lost phone doesn't lose them forever. They travel only inside the message you send, straight to the person you send it to.

Nothing is uploaded to us. Nothing is analysed. There is nowhere else for it to go.