How to use your iPhone’s health monitoring features

Apple’s main selling point for the Apple Watch is to monitor your health, including activities, sleep and certain medical conditions.

But it’s not the only Apple product that can help you get in shape and stay healthy. The humble iPhone also has many health tracking features.

You may already know that you can track your steps, for example. But the Health app built into your iPhone can do so much more, like tracking how much time you practice mindfulness using third-party apps, determining how much time you spend in bed, your walking speed and more.

Here are some examples of how the iPhone can help you stay healthy:

The Health app can automatically track the number of steps you take in a day. It can also track the number of stairs climbed and the total distance you have covered.

Apple doesn’t have its own meditation app, unless you count some of the exercises in its Fitness + subscription service, which has conscious cooling and yoga exercises. But, it can control the time you spend meditating in third-party applications, such as Calm or Headspace. If you install these applications, you will be prompted to save information to Apple Health and, after doing so, you can control how much time you meditate per day over time within the application.

You need an Apple Watch to monitor your sleep, but the iPhone can record how long you stay in bed and save that information.

It’s not a good analysis of your sleep, but you can get an idea of ​​your sleep patterns if you pick up your iPhone at night. You can activate it by selecting “options” in the “Complete programming and options” menu.

The iPhone also has a “deceleration” feature that automatically puts the iPhone in Do Not Disturb mode and darkens the screen. Once in this mode, you can set shortcuts on the lock screen to access meditation apps, a reading app like Kindle or Apple Books, and more. I use it every night so that my iPhone won’t disturb me when I sleep.

For women, the iPhone can track menstrual cycles and predict their next menstruation and fertile windows. You can also keep a record of your period’s flow level, any symptoms you may have that you want to share with your doctor, and more. It can also take into account factors that can affect your fertility window, such as pregnancy or contraception.

A feature called “Headphone audio levels” can control the volume of the headset audio and will let you know if you have heard music too loud above the recommended limit. Listening to music above 90 dB for four hours a week, for example, would trigger this alert.

You can keep track of the health records of your doctor visits if your doctor’s office supports integration with Apple Health. This allows you to see all kinds of information, including immunizations, blood test results, past medical procedures and more.

Review your health checklist

Apple also has an “integrity checklist” built into iOS 14, which was launched in September 2020.

The Health Checklist will help you create a medical ID on your phone, which you or someone else can show to rescuers. It has vital information, such as whether or not you are an organ donor, the type of blood you have, allergies and reactions, medications you are taking, your height and weight and much more. You enter this data yourself, so you don’t need to include it if you don’t want to.

The health checklist can also help you set up Emergency SOS, a feature on your iPhone that will automatically call emergency services if you tap the phone’s side button 5 times in quick succession. If you press and hold the button, it will also send a message to all contacts that you add to the emergency SOS. I have my immediate family members raised in mine, for example.