The Festival of Artisanal Software
A couple of months ago, Federico linked to David Walsh’s Medium post detailing HeartWatch, a deeply functional heart monitoring app. HeartWatch, according to Walsh, is a better way to visualize heart rate data pulled from your Apple Watch.
Now in version 2.0, HeartWatch looks to be a more all-encompassing aggregator of your heart information. After spending some time with the newest version of the app, I can highly suggest HeartWatch – not only for its capabilities but also for its potential.
I’ve previously noted how, almost a year into the Apple Watch, I haven’t found myself depending on any particular Watch app. I mostly use my Apple Watch for basic features such as notifications and timers, and I like wearing it because it looks nice. All the productivity or utility apps I’ve tried are either too slow, too complex for a tiny screen, or they don’t launch at all because of watchOS performance issues.
Great story and app idea by David Walsh: dissatisfied with the presentation of heart rate data in Apple’s Health app, he created HeartWatch – a dashboard for your heart rate data. The app works best if you’re an Apple Watch wearer (you get readings every 10 minutes) and it includes features such as peak zones, timelines, and – my favorite – separate tabs for regular, waking, and workout heartbeats.
Heart Watch lets you see how your heart is beating across three simple views. Waking, Regular & Workout. Each of these views are isolated because, while you may want a higher heart rate during a workout, if your heart is racing when you aren’t doing any exercise then this is likely not a good thing and probably something you might want to show your medical practitioner.
David has shared the full story behind the creation of HeartWatch in a blog post:
Now I wanted to dig a bit further to find when and what was happening with my heart. Unfortunately, the Health app wasn’t very much help from here forward. There’s a summary graph, then to go any further, you have to read every single heart beat reading captured. With no search! Proverbial needle in haystack. So I looked around to see if there were any apps to help. Short answer. No. They seem to fall into finger on the camera apps, “fitness junkie” apps or just giving a simple average.
My research also made me realise a simple average is close to useless if you work out. Obviously your heart rate will be higher when you work out. This then throws out the daily average compared to days you don’t work out.
So I started a side project. Something that could show me what was going on. This then of course grew, as these things tend to do.
I took HeartWatch for a spin, and I like what David is doing. The app imported months of heart rate data from Health in less than a minute and it presented me with a clear calendar view of different reading types. HeartWatch can show percentage changes from previous readings, and it neatly breaks down a day’s data with colored charts and labels. I would love to see these kinds of average stats for weekly and monthly stats too, but, overall, HeartWatch is off to a good start.
Like David Smith’s Pedometer++, HeartWatch is another app that uses data from the Apple Watch in an interesting and useful way. If you care about your heart rate as measured by the Watch (and you should), I recommend giving HeartWatch a try.
David Smith’s Pedometer++ is one of the apps that got me back in shape and I’ve always appreciated the thought and care that he puts into it.
Today, David released a substantial update to Pedometer++ with an entirely new logic to coalesce steps registered by the iPhone and Apple Watch:
You might be wondering why I don’t use Apple’s Health.app merging system for this. After extensive testing about how that works I determined that it doesn’t really do a good job for step data. The Apple Health algorithm works around the concept of a ‘priority’ device. This priority device’s steps are then used in all instances except where that device is completely unavailable. In which case the secondary devices data is used to fill in the gaps.
The concept of a fixed priority device doesn’t really work for step data. As you move between the various activities of your daily life, the best device for measuring your movement is constantly switching. Thus you need a data merging algorithm that can dynamically analyze your step data and determine which device’s data is best at any particular time.
That is exactly what Pedometer++ now does. It goes through your daily data and can dynamically determine which device to use for any particular point in your day. The result is a much richer and complete picture of your daily activity than you’d get from Health.
I’ve tried many pedometer apps for iPhone and Apple Watch over the past few months, and I’ve noticed annoying discrepancies between data recorded by my iPhone and steps measured by Apple Watch. David’s intelligent system to reconcile steps taken sounds like what I’m looking for. It’s been a while since I wanted to really check out a new watchOS app, too.
MedCity News has shared the story of Ken Robson, Apple Watch user who was able to correctly self-diagnose a heart ailment thanks to Apple Watch heart rate data:
When he got to the hospital, Robson told staff that he had been tracking his heart rate on the watch, and had two weeks of back data. “Going in with the data certainly reduced my stay by a couple of days,” he told MedCity News. It also assured that he could have the operation nearly immediately.
Because the hospital could check his Apple Watch data, Robson did not have to wear a heart monitor for a week before the medical team at Scripps Mercy could confirm the diagnosis of sick sinus syndrome.
Stephanie M. Lee, writing for BuzzFeed on an upcoming study by the University of California built with ResearchKit:
Now, a team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco is gearing up for what may prove to be the largest national study of LGBT health ever — and it’s using the iPhone to do it.
Dubbed the PRIDE Study, the effort will use an iPhone app based on Apple’s new ResearchKit software framework to assess the special health needs of the LGBT population. UCSF researchers plan to survey people about a broad range of health risk factors that may include HIV/AIDS, smoking, cancer, obesity, and depression. And they hope that the PRIDE Study app and the iPhone’s vast user base will deepen medical research into transgender and bisexual individuals — both relatively understudied populations compared to lesbians and gay men.
“The main question there is, what is the relationship between being LGBTQ — or more broadly a sexual or gender minority person — and mental and physical health?” Mitchell Lunn, co-director of The PRIDE Study and a clinical research fellow at UCSF, told BuzzFeed News. The app is debuting in June, LGBT Pride Month, just days before San Francisco’s annual Pride parade and ahead of an expected Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.
Great initiative. Hopefully we’ll continue to see more of these studies at a global scale.
David Smith, on his app Pedometer++ hitting one million downloads on the App Store:
Pedometer++ has become one of the most important apps in my portfolio and probably the app I’m now most widely known for.
It also carries with it an attribute that I’ve never experienced with any of my other projects—a sense of doing genuine good. I have had countless reports of how it has help people get healthier, recover from injury or lose weight. These are the stories that really impact me as a developer. The thought that something I made in my basement can have extended and improved people’s lives is truly remarkable.
David’s commitment to the app through the years is equally remarkable. Pedometer++ is one of the apps that is helping me live a healthier lifestyle, and it improved so much since the original version (which we first covered here).
SELF’s Fitness Director Liz Plosser has another solid review of the Apple Watch, with a focus on fitness (she gave birth to a baby boy five days before getting a Watch). Make sure to read until the end, though, because her conclusion is surprising and smart.
I began testing the Apple Watch five days after giving birth to a baby boy—not a traditional fitness event like a marathon, but an exhausting physical experience nevertheless. And since strapping on the coveted gadget, my “workouts” have consisted of walking to and from my baby’s bassinet at all hours of the day (and night) and pushing him in a stroller to his pediatrician’s office a half-mile away for newborn check-ups. But Apple Watch gives me credit for that stuff (as it should!). Even when the Watch’s Workout app isn’t open, its accelerometer, along with GPS from your phone, measures all of your physical movement. The three-ring interface keeps tabs on the minutes you spend in each category (exercise, movement and standing), and is so intuitive that even my four-year-old twins understand how it works. Plus, I love that all it takes is a flick of my wrist and a quick glance to enjoy the instant gratification of knowing how much activity I’ve logged—I don’t need to sync it to my laptop or wait for an app to load on my phone.
Marissa Stephenson, writing for Men’s Journal, has one of the Apple Watch reviews I wanted to read today. Stephenson’s review is focused on fitness and using Apple Watch during workouts.
It won’t replace your heart rate monitor.
To track any workout, the Watch employs an accelerometer and optical heart rate monitor. I used the Watch’s built-in Workout app whenever I began a session, designating if I was going for a run, walk, cycle, or “other.” Just like nearly every other tracker or sports watch on the market, the Watch is primed to gauge my cardio workouts, but not muscle-activation during strength training — if I bend over to pick up a quarter or a 200-pound barbell, it doesn’t know the difference. But the Apple Watch can factor heart rate. Pick up that barbell enough, and it should read my elevated heart rate and log a higher calorie burn. Except the optical HRM didn’t really seem to do that. Huffing through heavy squats, the Watch read my heart rate as fairly low. And more frenetic CrossFit workouts perplexed it; the Watch couldn’t get a read on my second-by-second HR during box jumps, burpees, and pull-ups, and my overall calorie burn and HR seemed off for these “other”-type training sessions. That’s a problem Apple says you can fix by using a heart rate monitor strap and synching it with your Watch. Or, maybe you don’t care so much about hyper-accurate HR and calorie counts, and in that case, just go by the Watch’s less-than-perfect estimate.
Based on Stephenson’s take, it seems like Apple could use a few updates to make the Watch more accurate and compatible with a wider variety of workouts. I look forward to trying one in my daily routine soon.
