Skip to main content

Your Apple Watch will soon play an even bigger part in maintaining your well-being

Apple Watch Series 2
Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Apple is prepping some new apps for the Apple Watch to further cement its position as one of the best fitness trackers on the market, while filling a few holes in its current lineup. According to Bloomberg, the move is aimed at moving HealthKit away from a platform to record health and fitness data to something that provides actionable information.

For example, one new app is a sleep tracker, which shouldn’t be all too surprising given the refresh that Apple’s watch app received with iOS 10. With the iPhone, you can now set your alarms based on how long you’d like to sleep, and iOS 10 does do some rudimentary sleep analysis by attempting to detect when you’re asleep by your phone activity.

Related Videos

The other appears to be a new type of fitness app that analyzes how your heart rate falls to its resting level to judge your level of fitness. While these apps will have a measurable benefit to you, Apple is also aiming to make HealthKit usable for medical diagnoses. With all that data, the company sees a big opportunity to gain a foothold in the $8 trillion global healthcare industry.

Apple already has the know-how to do so. Earlier this year it acquired Gliimpse, a startup that aims to bring together separate medical databases and store them in a central location. But the hardware won’t change, both due to strict FDA regulations on medical devices and a desire to focus on features that benefit the most consumers — a heart-rate monitor over a glucose meter, for example.

It is unclear if these new features are part of early work for iOS 11, or just snippets of what we can expect longer term from Apple. In any case, given Apple’s heavy focus on this area, it looks like what we’ve seen so far concerning well-being in iOS 10 is only the beginning.

Editors' Recommendations

Apple, please release the iPhone 14 in these colors next 
Mockup render of the iPhone 14 in an orange color.

You've probably heard the news by now. Earlier this week, Apple released a new yellow color for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus -- and it's now up for pre-order. Does it look good? I sure think so! It's a bright, vibrant, and saturated yellow that adds a lot of pop to a mostly muted color palette for the iPhone 14 series.

But as much as I like how the yellow looks, it's not the only color I'd love to see the iPhone come in. There are so many possibilities for future iPhone colors, and if Apple's looking for a few tips on what to do next, I have some suggestions. Here are five colors Apple should release the iPhone 14 in next (hopefully soon).
Dark green

Read more
Watch the Galaxy S23 Ultra and iPhone 14 Pro Max face off in brutal drop test
samsung galaxy s23 ultra iphone 14 pro max drop test watch phonebuff

Samsung’s latest flagship, the Galaxy S23 Ultra, is one of the year's best phones. It comes equipped with the powerful new, purpose-build Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chip, a 200MP main camera, and Corning’s Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the front and back of the device (which means heavy durability).

But there’s another question — how does Gorilla Glass Victus 2 hold up against Apple’s confidently-named 'Ceramic Shield' on the iPhone 14 Pro Max? YouTuber PhoneBuff did a drop test to find that very answer.

Read more
Have a Pixel Watch? You need to stop using one of its most important features
The Google Pixel Watch's Pilot Bold watch face.

The Pixel Watch is a relatively solid smartwatch, albeit a little pricey. Still, several user reports are claiming that there's a major issue with one of its most important features: the alarm.

According to several posts by Pixel Watch owners on the subreddit r/PixelWatch, the alarm app is malfunctioning in several different ways — ranging from alarms going off at unscheduled times to the alarm not sounding at all.

Read more