New year, new you! With the Twenty-twenties just getting started, it’s time to get rolling on your New Year’s resolutions.

If you want to make amends for pigging out and get in shape for the new decade, we have an essential guide to nailing your New Year’s resolutions with Apple Watch.

Plus we have a guide to getting started with HomeKit automation, some juicy new iPhone 12 rumors, and advice on how to control a remote Mac using iMessage screen sharing. It’s all in this week’s free Cult of Mac Magazine.

Apple today unveiled its brand-new Research app for iPhone, with three new health studies for users in the United States.

The Apple Women’s Health Study, the Apple Heart and Movement Study, and the Apple Hearing Study are available from today. They give participants the opportunity to contribute to “groundbreaking medical discoveries with iPhone and Apple Watch.”

Apple and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs today confirmed the availability of Health Records on iPhone for veterans across the United States and surrounding territories.

The feature promises to provide a better understanding of veterans’ health across multiple providers. They include Johns Hopkins and the University of California, San Diego.

In watchOS 6, your Apple Watch can monitor the noise levels around you, and warn you when things get too loud. This is an essential tool to help people who work in noisy environments avoid hearing damage, but it’s also a handy safeguard against excessive noise for anyone.

Here’s how to set up Apple Watch noise alerts.

Apple didn’t predict how important health-tracking tech would be to the Apple Watch, COO Jeff Williams said in an interview published over the weekend.

“It was very organic,” he said. “Most people think we had this major health initiative, well, we had some notions in the beginning but no idea where it would lead. And honestly, it’s a situation where we started pulling on threads and the more we pulled, the more we realised there’s such a huge opportunity for us to impact people with the information that’s on their wrist.”

The new Apple Watch series 5, running watchOS 6, can track just about any kind of activity. But one thing it doesn’t track is your sleep. Or at least, it doesn’t offer sleep-tracking in a native form. That’s left to third-party app makers. Today we’ll see two great apps to do just that. One is ultra-simple, and the other is super deep. Let’s take a look.

The ability to have back-and-forth conversations about users’ health problems is one of several new abilities planned for Siri in “fall 2021,” a new report claims.

Based on leaked documents, The Guardian says that Apple is planning a host of new features for its AI assistant. These will include built-in machine translation and, intriguingly, support for a new, unspecified piece of Siri hardware.

One of the first employees recruited for Apple’s health team has left Apple to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Andrew Trister joined Apple in 2016, shortly after it introduced Apple Watch. Since then, Apple has heavily piloted in the direction of health-tracking. Tim Cook has said Apple’s focus on health will be its, “greatest contribution to mankind.”

Researchers built a smartphone app that can check blood pressure by simply recording a short video of someone’s face, then analyzing the blood flow under the skin.

High blood pressure can lead to heart attack or stroke so making an easy at-home test for it could save huge numbers of lives.

Apple Watch has proven to be a lifesaver many times over for its owners but now it’s also being used to help save people that don’t even own one.

A physician in San Diego recently shared how he used the ECG on his Apple Watch Series 4 to detect atrial fibrillation in someone while chilling at a restaurant. And it probably saved the person’s life.