If you have trouble sleeping, the Apple Watch might help you get to the bottom of what’s going on. New to watchOS 9, it can track what sleep stage you’re in. That means you can see if you’re not getting enough deep sleep or REM sleep, or if you’re waking up too often in the middle of the night. If you have insomnia or sleep apnea, this information could be very useful.
Read on to see how to use the advanced sleep stage tracking in watchOS 9.
Apple laid out its far-reaching goals for the health and wellness tech built into iPhone and Apple Watch in a report issued Wednesday. It details how Apple intends to develop technology to support personal health, medical research, and patient care.
“We believe passionately that technology can play a role in improving health outcomes,” said Apple’s chief operating officer, Jeff Williams, in a statement.
The iPhone Health app’s Cycle Tracking feature provides a simple solution for logging menstrual cycles. If you menstruate, it’s an effective way to monitor your overall health and estimate when you’re most likely to get pregnant.
Given the personal nature of Cycle Tracking data, you need to be sure that it’s stored securely, away from prying eyes. The good news is, Apple’s security for health and fitness data is very robust. There are just a few things you need to know to ensure your data is safe.
Are you drinking enough water? Probably not. But if you want to know for sure, Apple’s online and retail stores have started selling two new smart water bottles from HidrateSpark. They automatically track your water intake and sync it to the Apple Health app.
They do it for a price, that is. The two new smart water bottles are $80 and $60. And if drinking enough water on a regular basis adds years to your life, that might actually be worth it.
The blood oxygen sensor featured in Apple Watch Series 6 and 7 is “not intended for medical use,” Apple says. That seems odd, considering that low blood oxygen is a serious medical condition. If the watch’s monitor is not for medical use, then what exactly is it for?
In this post, we’ll look at what blood oxygen is, how Apple Watch measures it, how the device compares to medical-grade alternatives, and what you can actually use it for.
There’s an interesting new feature in iOS 14 that you might never have noticed. It’s called Mobility Metrics, and it tracks several things that offer insight into your overall fitness, coordination and health. Find out where to look for these metrics, and what to make of them, in our in-depth Mobility Metrics how-to.
Also in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine, we’ve got several hot rumors about upcoming Apple gear (and a possible March 16 event), plus loads of Apple TV+ reviews and first looks at upcoming shows. Download it now to enjoy on your iOS device.
P.S. If you’re a fan of Apple lore, don’t miss our exclusive interview with Del Yocam, the company’s first COO and a mentor to Steve Jobs. He’s got some interesting stories to tell.
The new Mobility Metrics feature that Apple added in iOS 14 offers important insights into your health and fitness. Using its built-in sensors and some extremely smart software, the iPhone in your hip pocket captures data and analyzes how you walk at all times. Then, the Health app serves up seven key measurements that provide an overall picture of your strength, coordination and cardiovascular health.
Even if you don’t experience any mobility difficulties, you might still be interested to see what these new stats reveal about the way you walk.
Apple’s VO2 max metric measures the performance of your heart and lungs when you push yourself to the limit. Up until now, though, it’s only been useful to serious fitness fanatics. No wonder Apple buried it in the Health app, where most users never found it.
But watchOS 7.2 and iOS 14.3, which Apple released Monday, change all that. In those updates, the VO2 max metric has been renamed Cardio Fitness. Now it can detect lower ranges and send alerts when the reading gets too low. That makes it the latest in a series of potentially life-saving health notifications from Apple Watch.
Here’s everything you need to know to get the benefit of this essential new feature.
A concept artist shows what the iPhone’s Health application could look like after being redesigned for Mac.
Currently, this software is only for iOS. There’s not even an iPad version. This concept, created in SwiftUI, hopes to convince Apple to change that.
As a fitness writer and app developer, there’s just one thing I’m hoping to see at WWDC next week: a major upgrade to HealthKit.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Apple’s health-tracking framework is great, but there’s so much more it could do. Moving HealthKit to iCloud would finally set Apple Watch free from its iPhone dependency, launch a brand-new Apple subscription service, enable users to access health and fitness data on all their devices, create a whole new class of TV fitness apps, and much, much more.
