About two months ago, Apple held the WWDC 2024 conference. Many New software feature announcements. There were a lot of intriguing things, but my favorite announcement from the show was watchOS 11.
Why? Because watchOS 11 adds features I've been hoping for on the Apple Watch for a long time, like pausing the Activity rings and seeing more detailed workout/exercise data. It also adds the new Vitals app, which I've been using on my Apple Watch Ultra 2 for the past few weeks and it lives up to my expectations.
What are Vitals and how do they work?
Before we jump straight into the hype, let's take a moment to recap: What is the Vitals app? It's a new app that gets installed on your Apple Watch when you download watchOS 11. The icon is pretty confusing, but when you see the app with the three blue dots and one pink dot (pictured above), it's easy to figure out what it is.
Vitals don't necessarily give you anything new Health data. Instead, it presents a new perspective on the information your Apple Watch already records while you sleep. The app looks for five metrics: heart rate, respiration rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep time. When you wear your Apple Watch to sleep, when you wake up in the morning, the Vitals app will show you how all these metrics recorded overnight.
And that's it. Every morning I open the Vitals app to see how I'm doing and get on with my day. Other than that, there's not much else it does, so why do I love it so much?
A simple and useful app
As I've reviewed smartwatches and smart rings over the past year, I've found that information overload is a very real and troubling problem. Today's wearables can be tracked So There is a lot of data on health Looking at that data isn't always useful. You want your wearable to tell you why you should care about certain health metrics, instead of making you think about them yourself. This is what Vitals does best.
Each of the five data points – heart rate, breathing rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen level and sleep time – is displayed in a big blue box, and if it's within that box, it's within your body's normal range and there's no need to worry.
But if any of them go above or below the normal range, they'll show up as pink dots and be marked as outliers. If your Apple Watch detects two or more outliers overnight, you'll get a notification letting you know something might be wrong.
Most of the time, I wake up, look at my Apple Watch to make sure my vital signs are as expected, and start my day. It only takes a few seconds to know if my body is functioning properly, unless one day the app alerted me that my wrist temperature was higher than usual. I was already feeling pretty stuffy and sluggish, so knowing my temperature was elevated was a good cue to take some cold/flu medicine before starting work that morning.
This is how health tracking on a smartwatch should be, and it's the polar opposite of competing watches that came out this year. For example, the Vitals app isn't as technically advanced as the AGEs Index on the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra, but I have no idea what you're getting at with the AGE number. I'm all for companies adding new and innovative health features to wearables, but if it's too arcane or complicated to understand, it's no good. Sometimes less is more, and the Vitals app does just that.
This is exactly what the Apple Watch needs
The Vitals app is exactly what I love about health features. Not added yet Another Rather than tracking and trying to interpret health metrics, it takes the existing health data from your Apple Watch and uses it to do something useful.
Plus, it's not an app you need to spend a lot of time in, and Apple doesn't want you to either. Every morning, you get a summary of your vitals as a widget in your Smart Stack, which you can tap to see specific numbers for each of the five metrics. You can also tap the calendar icon to compare today's numbers with the past seven days, but that's it. You don't need to spend a lot of time in this app; it's meant to be about checking your metrics, making sure everything's on track, and getting on with your day.
I can't wait for more people to start using Vitals when watchOS 11 is fully released later this year, and hope this is a sign of more things to come. The Apple Watch is an incredibly powerful health/fitness tracker, but like many other wearables, it doesn't always display your health data in the most user-friendly way. The Vitals app is a great step towards solving that problem, and after testing it myself, I think it's great.