Keep an eye on your body: What the Apple Watch can do for your health

The Apple Watch also has a good reputation as a health tracker. Over the years, she has not only expanded her skills as a fitness guide, but also her diagnostic skills. For example, she can detect atrial fibrillation, which is considered an indication of an increased risk of stroke. You can monitor and configure a lot of this on the iPhone in the Watch app and in Health – as well as on the Watch itself. We’ll show you where.

To start: health data and data protection

Apple’s center for all health and fitness data is the Health app. The app itself can only be opened on the iPhone. It starts with the “Overview” menu, which you can help shape by tapping “Edit” in the top right. On the following page you set favorites for the overview. To make the selection easier, you can use a switch at the top to restrict the fields to those that already contain “existing data”. Back in the overview, trend analyzes generated by Apple, for example for resting heart rate or your sleep data, as well as noteworthy developments highlighted as highlights appear under your favorites. The quite interesting overview ends with a few articles and app tips on the subject of health selected by Apple. Use the menu bar at the bottom to switch to the “Discover” view. There you can access the various health areas via categories and find individual data fields and rows more easily.

While there isn’t currently an app of the same name on the watch, Health has a presence there as well, via the settings on the watch. There you will find all apps installed on the watch under “Health > Sources > Apps” and determine for each individually which data they can write to Health and which they can read. For example, to compare multiple sleep apps, allow the apps to read heart rate, breathing rate, and blood oxygen, but don’t allow the sleep data to be written back to Health so you can compare the apps to Apple’s own sleep analysis.