A little over two months ago, Apple unveiled a plethora of new software features at its WWDC 2024 conference. While there were many exciting announcements, the one that truly caught my attention was watchOS 11. This update introduces features I’ve been eagerly anticipating for years, such as the ability to pause activity rings and access more detailed training and exercise data. But it’s the new Vitals app that has me truly impressed.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using the Vitals app on my Apple Watch Ultra 2, and it’s exactly what I hoped it would be. The app doesn’t provide any new health data per se, but rather takes information your Apple Watch already gathers while you sleep and presents it in a clear, digestible way.
Vitals focuses on five key metrics: heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. You wear your Apple Watch to bed, and when you wake up, the Vitals app shows you how these metrics were recorded throughout the night. That’s it. Open the app each morning, take a quick glance, and get on with your day.
It’s simplicity, however, is what makes it so powerful. As I’ve tested more and more smartwatches and smart rings in the past year, I’ve realized that information overload is a genuine problem. Today’s wearables track an overwhelming amount of health data, but simply seeing that data isn’t necessarily helpful. What I want is for my wearable to tell me why I should care about a certain health metric, not leave it up to me to decipher. That’s where Vitals excels.
Each of the five data points is presented in a large blue box. If the data falls within that box, it’s within your body’s typical range, and nothing to be concerned about. However, if any metric goes above or below your normal range, it appears as a pink dot and is marked as an outlier. If your Apple Watch detects two or more outliers in a single night, you’ll receive a notification, letting you know that something might be off.
Most days, I wake up, check my Apple Watch, confirm my vitals are as expected, and move on with my day. It takes just a couple of seconds, and it’s all I need to know that my body is functioning as it should. However, there was one day when the app alerted me that my wrist temperature was higher than usual. I was already feeling congested and sluggish, and knowing my body temperature was elevated gave me a good reason to take some cold/flu medicine before starting work that morning.
This is precisely how health tracking on smartwatches should work. It’s a refreshing change from the complex, confusing health features we’ve seen on some competing watches this year. For instance, while the AGEs Index on the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is technically impressive, I have no idea what to make of my AGEs numbers. I welcome companies adding new and innovative health features to wearables, but they’re meaningless if they’re too dense or complicated to understand. Sometimes, less is more, and that’s what the Vitals app does so well.
The Vitals app is exactly the kind of health feature I love. It doesn’t add another health metric to keep track of and interpret. Instead, it takes existing health data from my Apple Watch and makes it meaningful. It’s also an app you don’t need to spend much time in. You can see your vitals overview as a widget in the Smart Stack each morning, and if you tap on it, you can view specific numbers for each metric. You can also tap a calendar icon to compare today’s numbers to the past seven days, but that’s it. You’re not supposed to get bogged down in it. You’re meant to check your metrics, ensure everything is in order, and go about your day.
I can’t wait for more people to use Vitals when watchOS 11 is fully released later this year. I hope this app is a sign of more user-friendly and impactful health features to come. The Apple Watch is an incredibly powerful health and fitness tracker, but like many other wearables, it doesn’t always present its health data in the most intuitive way. The Vitals app is a fantastic step toward fixing that, and after testing it myself, I believe it’s a brilliant addition to the Apple Watch.
