Just over two months ago, Apple held its WWDC 2024 conference and unveiled a much of new software features. There was a lot to dive into, but my favorite announcement of the show was watchOS 11.
Why? Because watchOS 11 adds features I’ve long wanted for the Apple Watch – like the ability to pause activity rings and show you more reliable workout/exercise data. It also adds the new Vitals app. I’ve been using Vitals on my Apple Watch Ultra 2 for a few weeks now and it’s everything I hoped the app would be.
What Vitals is and how it works
That’s high praise right off the bat, but let’s quickly back up a step: What is the Vitals app? It’s a new app you get on your Apple Watch after downloading watchOS 11. The icon is pretty ambiguous, but once you see the app with three blue dots and one pink dot (pictured above), you know you’ve found it.
Vitals does not necessarily give you new Health data. Instead, it presents information your Apple Watch already records while you sleep in a new light. The app looks for five metrics: heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. Wear your Apple Watch to bed, and when you wake up in the morning, the Vitals app will show you how it recorded all of these metrics overnight.
And that’s it! Open the Vitals app every morning, see where you stand, and start your day. There’s not much more to it, so why do I like it so much?
A simple, helpful app
As I tested more and more smartwatches and smart rings over the past year, I realized that information overload is a very real and annoying problem. Today’s wearables can track So many health data, but only Seeing this data isn’t necessarily helpful. I want my wearable to tell me why I should care about a particular health metric – not have me figure it out on my own. That’s what Vitals does so well.
Each of these five data points – heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen and sleep duration – is shown in a large blue box. If they are within this box, they are within your body’s normal range and are nothing to worry about.
However, if any of these values go above or below your normal range, it will appear as a pink dot and be marked as an outlier. If your Apple Watch detects two or more outliers in one night, you’ll receive a notification alerting you that something may be wrong.
Most days, I wake up, check my Apple Watch, make sure my vitals are as expected, and go about my day. It only takes a few seconds and is all I need to know my body is doing what it’s supposed to—except for one day when the app alerted me that my wrist temperature was higher than usual. I was already feeling pretty congested and lightheaded, and knowing my body temperature was elevated was a good nudge to take a cold/flu medicine before starting work that morning.
This is how health tracking should work on smartwatches, and it’s also a perfect antithesis to what we’ve seen from some competing watches this year. For example, the Vitals app isn’t nearly as technically impressive as the AGEs index on the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra, but I have no idea what to make of my AGEs numbers either. I’m all for companies adding new and innovative health features to wearable devices, but they mean nothing if they’re too dense or complicated to understand. Sometimes less is more, and that’s what the Vitals app does so well.
This is exactly what the Apple Watch needed
The Vitals app is exactly the kind of health feature I love. It doesn’t yet add another health metric that I need to track and interpret. Instead, it takes existing health data from my Apple Watch and does something useful with it.
Plus, it’s not an app you need to spend a lot of time on, and Apple doesn’t want you to. You can see your vitals every morning as a widget in the Smart Stack, and tapping it lets you see specific numbers for each of the five metrics. You can also tap a calendar icon to compare today’s numbers to the past seven days, but that’s about it. You shouldn’t spend a lot of time on it. You’re meant to see your metrics, make sure everything’s OK, and go about your day.
I can’t wait to see more people using Vitals when watchOS 11 is fully released later this year, and I hope this is a sign of more things like this to come. The Apple Watch is an incredibly powerful health/fitness tracker, but like so many other wearables, it doesn’t always present its health data in the most user-friendly way. The Vitals app is an excellent step towards fixing that, and having tested it myself, I think it’s brilliant.
