You can use your Apple Watch for health by tracking various metrics, monitoring activity, and receiving notifications about your well-being.
The Apple Watch serves as a comprehensive personal health tracker right on your wrist, offering insights into your daily activity and key health metrics. By wearing it throughout the day and night, you can gain valuable data about your physical state and trends over time.
Tracking Overnight Health with the Vitals App
One of the key ways to use your Apple Watch for health, particularly overnight, is through the Vitals app. As noted in the reference:
With the Vitals app, you can quickly see your overnight health metrics right on your watch: heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen*, and sleep duration. When you wear your Apple Watch to sleep, the Vitals app establishes a typical range for each of your health metrics.
Wearing your Apple Watch while sleeping enables it to automatically collect data on these vital signs. The Vitals app analyzes this data to show you how these metrics are trending relative to your personal baselines, helping you identify any significant deviations that might warrant attention.
Monitoring Daily Activity and Workouts
Beyond sleep tracking, the Apple Watch is a powerful tool for monitoring your physical activity:
- Activity Rings: Track your daily movement with three simple rings: Move (active calories burned), Exercise (minutes of brisk activity), and Stand (hours you've stood and moved for at least a minute). Closing these rings encourages you to stay active.
- Workouts App: Choose from a wide range of workout types to track specific exercises like running, cycling, swimming, yoga, and more. The watch provides real-time metrics such as distance, pace, heart rate, and calories burned.
- Fitness Trends: See how your activity metrics (like resting heart rate, walking pace, and workout duration) are changing over the past year in the iPhone's Health app.
Comprehensive Health Monitoring Features
The Apple Watch includes several other health-focused features:
- Heart Health:
- High/Low Heart Rate Notifications: Get alerts if your heart rate appears unusually high or low while you seem to be inactive.
- Irregular Rhythm Notifications: The watch can check for irregular heart rhythms that could be indicative of atrial fibrillation (AFib).
- ECG App: Take an electrocardiogram from your wrist to record electrical signals from your heart and check them for signs of AFib (available on specific models).
- Blood Oxygen App: Measure your blood oxygen saturation on demand (available on specific models). This is one of the overnight metrics visible in the Vitals app.
- Sleep Tracking: Set a sleep schedule, track your sleep stages (Core, Deep, REM), view your respiratory rate while sleeping, and see your sleep duration. This data is also integrated into the Vitals app overview.
- Wrist Temperature Sensing: Provides retrospective estimates of ovulations and improves period predictions (available on specific models). This temperature data is also part of the Vitals app overview.
- Fall Detection: If the watch detects a hard fall, it can help connect you to emergency services (available on specific models).
- Noise Monitoring: Measures the ambient sound levels around you and can notify you if they reach a level that could potentially impact your hearing.
- Medications App: Helps you track your medication schedule and receive reminders.
- Mindfulness App: Provides tools for reflection and mindful breathing to support mental well-being.
By leveraging these features and consistently wearing your device, especially overnight for Vitals app data, the Apple Watch provides valuable insights into your health patterns and helps you stay informed and motivated towards a healthier lifestyle.
