Sunday, October 25, 2015

App of the Month

I believe the Apple Health app is part of iOS 9.

It is possible it has been on my phone longer, and I've just never noticed. Sometimes I am unaware of the things Apple sneaks onto my phone.

In my mind, Apple Health would have had to been here since the release of the Apple Watch, but with our researching that (and we all know I'm too eff'ing lazy to do that), it's just a guess.

I suppose this is much like a Fitbit or similar device. Except that it is much larger than clipping a Fitbit to your waist or strapping it on your wrist.

Sometimes it's just not that easy or practical to carry your iPhone everywhere. (Of course, I've never dived into a pool with my iPhone, the way I've done with my Fitbit either.)

While of course it tracks your steps and flights of stairs {don't they all?}


Apple Health does it in increments. It calculates your steps every few minutes. This way you can see how often the dog stops to smell something or take a dump, and you have to stop. You get 321 steps in at once and well, he's on the move. I'm not sure exactly what you're supposed to do with this, but you know - you can't change what you don't measure.

And it incorporates other things in that say Fitbit would do via their website: including nutrition, weight and sleep - though really, if you wear the Fitibt at night it tracks your sleep automatically and their scale sends your weight to the site for auto-tracking.

Here, you have to add manually. That's a chore.

But not as big of a chore as some of the other things:


Entering all your measurements, fitness, 'me' info - which is fairly easy enough. In theory.


At least with me, there is no way to enter my DOB, my sex (hehehe) my Blood Type (A-, thank you) or whatever the fuck my Fitzgerald Skin Type is.


There is inconsistency with what you can and cannot enter in the Results section. And sorry, but I've worked in healthcare all my adult life and I think most people would not know what an O2 Saturation rate is, let alone what theirs is or how to collect that data point. Ditto with Peripheral Perfusion, Forced Vital Capacity and any other number of info gathering.



And really who doesn't want to know their Cervical Mucus Quality?   Is it Dry? Sticky? Creamy!? , Watery? Egg White????  To be honest, I'm not sure there is a good answer there. And there doesn't seem to be an All of the Above category.

This is one of those Apple Apps you cannot delete - like Apple Phone, App Store, Messenger, etc. So use it or don't.

My beef with it is, there are lots of parts not able to be used even if you even know the data. And even if it worked, it is a lot of manual intervention. So, I'm not quite sure why Apple rushed this out when so much of it is unusable at this point.

I'll let it track my steps and flight of stairs climbing, but I can't imagine doing much else for it. My doctor has an EHR that I can track all my blood and system results.

Maybe in additional iterations Apple will improve upon this app. But for now, there is a lot to be desired.

2 comments:

Fearsome Beard said...

iOS 8, that's when it showed up on my iPhone. Been using it since last December when I got the 6 with 8.0 on it. I've yet to enter my cervicle mucus quality or my menstration.

Erik Rubright said...

It's been on there since iOS8. And for me, this is the biggest benefit of the app: http://erikrubright.com/blog/ice-ice-baby/. Which is also where you enter your DOB, et.al. Or under the "Me" section under Health Data in list mode. ;-)