Including the ability to share your info with others.

Apple’s health app is adding three new features

Tech

Apple’s health app is adding three new features


Let's start with mobility. The way that you move and walk can indicate balance issues and gait impairment. This is the leading cause of falls and adults. Currently fall risk is assessed by a care provider through a questionnaire and an in person evaluation. But this can missile on your everyday movement. So important changes can go unnoticed. Your iphone already captures mobility data as you walk with scientifically validated metrics where building on this to introduce a completely new way to assess your risk of falling called walking steadiness for the first time ever, you can get inside if your fall risk increases and take action early to improve your steadiness. Let's take a quick look at some of the science behind this. As you walk with your iphone to built in motion sensors automatically measure how fast and how evenly you walk the length of your step and the timing of each step, right down to how often you have both feet on the ground Combined, these metrics provide powerful insight on changes in your balance, stability, and coordination. We used real world data from the Apple heart and movement study with over 100,000 participants across all ages. This is the largest data that ever used to study fall risk and it helped create this first of its kind health metric. You can view your walking steadiness in the health app. You'll see a classification of okay. If the metrics show that you're stable while walking, you can see how you're walking steadiness may change as the months go by and receive a notification. If your steadiness is low or very low and you're at increased risk of falling, you can also learn how to improve your steadiness. There are movement exercises right in the health app and these can help you increase your strength and balance and reduce your risk of falling. Now back to symbol to tell you about another way to monitor health changes. You can already view lab results like your cholesterol right in the health app. In the us alone, 14 billion clinical laboratory tests are performed each year. That is a lot of information to keep track of when you see your own results come in, it can be hard to understand what these tests mean or what has changed. The health app will now include detailed descriptions to help you better understand your lab data. For example, when you receive a cholesterol result, you can now see that the LDL is a bad cholesterol and having too much may put you at risk for heart disease. You can also now see whether your labs are within expected ranges. Together, these views will help you get even more meaning from your lab results. Many health changes happen over time. So, to better understand your health even more holistically, we're introducing trends. You'll get insight on long term changes across areas such as step resting heart rate, blood glucose sleep and much more. You'll also be alerted when there's a new trend in your data, which may be something you want to monitor more closely or even discussed with your physician. So if you're getting more daily walks in, your health summary will show that your steps taken have increased over the last few months. This is a great way to celebrate progress towards meeting your health goals and a powerful new way to get early insight into potential health issues with trends, walking steadiness and a better labs experience. You have three new ways to see changes in your overall health. Another really important part of managing her health is having meaningful conversations with your doctor during your visit, physicians look at your vitals and labs, but we'll also ask you about everyday health activities like exercise and sleep. And patients can often have difficulty remembering all of these details. But the health app has all of this valuable information. So to support this conversation, you can now share health data that you choose with your health care provider in a private way. For example, if you have a concern about your heart health, you can now share your heart data. This is shared securely no one else, including Apple will see this information now. For many of us, it's not just the changes in our own health we care about. It's the health of our family and loved ones too, whether they live with us or far away. For some of us, that means taking care of our kids and for others it's our aging parents and for many of us it's actually taking care of both generations above and below to empower you to care for others. Were introducing health sharing a private and secure way to view health data trends and alerts for the people most important to you. For example, I could set up a sharing relationship with my mom and with her permission I could view data like her heart rate activity and labs and just like with my own health data trends. Proactively highlights changes in my mom's health data for me, I can also receive notifications including high heart rate alerts, changes in mobility and more and it's easy for me to connect with her about her health. So if I see a noteworthy change like a resting heart rate increasing, I can simply tap messages and start a conversation with my mom.