Gone are the days you used watches only for checking the time. We now have wearable gadgets that not only shows you time but brings with them some other perks also (heart rate monitoring, fitness tracking, etc.).

Speaking of wearables, we can’t overlook Apple Watch. Released four years ago in 2015, it has gone past five generations. The newest one in the market is Apple Watch Series 5 that went live on 20 September 2019.

Apple Watch 5
Apple Watch Series 5

Apple has imposed some restrictions on the features of their wearable. Meaning, you can enjoy some only in selected countries. But, when you move out to an unsupported region, the features (only the constrained ones) will disappear.

One of them is Electrocardiogram aka ECG. As you know, it’s a recording of the heart’s electrical activity. Without having to place electrodes on your chest, Apple Watch can take your ECG with the help of a dedicated app (available from Series 4).

ECG available countries
Tap/click to zoom (Source)

Even though you buy an Apple Watch from a country listed above, ECG feature will go useless when you enter an unsupported location. So, you wish for a method to get the feature back, don’t you? Well, we have got workarounds for both regular and jailbroken iPhones.

Let me first show you how it’s done on a regular phone. But before that, you need to meet a few requirements given below. Once you ensure that, you can go on tweaking the Apple Watch for ECG.

Requirements:
1. Any iPhone which supports Apple Watch series 4 and above.
2. Apple Watch series 4 and above from ECG enabled region.
3. iMazing App. It’s available for both PC/Mac. But your operation system must be 64bit if you use PC.
4. ECG activation file (Download), extract it and get a .plist file.
5. You should open “Health” app on your iPhone at least once.

The following are the steps one has to go through in order to have ECG feature on their Apple Watch.

▼ You must enable Backup Encryption or the health database won’t be backed up.
▼ After applying the options, click Backup to make a backup immediately.
▼ Then, click the button above, choose the backup file we just made, and then choose “Edit”. iMazing would ask you to make a “backup of your backup”, confirm that.
▼ Now you can find “Editable Backups”, choose the one we made, choose “File System” and go to the directory of HomeDomain/Library/Preferences. Unarchive the ECG activation file, you would get a file named com.apple.private.health.heart-rhythm.plist
▼ Click “Copy to Backup”, make sure it’s under HomeDomain/Library/Preferences directory.
▼ Choose the backup file we modified, click “Restore to Device”, follow the instructions.
▼ Do not check “Erase target devices” if you have eSIM installed, it may erase your eSIM too. If your storage is not enough for restoring a backup, try to delete some photos (because you will recover them after restoring), or do a DFU restoring to clean all contents. (DFU restoring doesn’t remove your eSIM).
After restoring your iPhone, now you can pair your Apple Watch. Please don’t restore Apple Watch backup file.

apple watch ecg
Source

What if you have a jailbroken iPhone or you are willing to jailbreak your regular device. Unlike the previous method, this one is pretty much straightforward and don’t want you to go through a numerous complicated steps.

Full Instructions:
1. Unpair your Apple watch
2. Install this tweak
3. Reboot after tweak is installed (some users reported ldrestart is enough – I will add this later)
4. Jailbreak your iPhone
5. Re-pair your Apple Watch (do not restore from backup your apple watch)
6. Enable the ECG feature
(Source)

Note:- Follow our iOS section for similar stories.

PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.

Rahul Krishnan
282 Posts

Rahul Krishnan, a wordsmith from Kerala, India is always in lookout for his next article idea. He is a fanatic reader. And, the rumour is that his mom has recently hidden his debit card so that he won't buy books anymore. She doesn't know he has a spare one.

Next article View Article

[Update: Crashing when sending gifts] Pokemon Go crashing on iPhones and other iOS devices, but there's a fix

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story……. Original story (published on August 26, 2018) follows: Fresh reports are coming in that users of the popular Pokemon...
Aug 14, 2023 4 Min Read