“Apple’s new Health app appears to track everything measurable about the body — sleep patterns, blood alcohol content, heart rate, inhaler usage, times fallen, you name it,” Michelle Quinn reports for The Mercury News.
“Via the censors on my iPhone, Health charts the stairs I climb and steps I take without me asking. There is even a category called the ‘peripheral perfusion index,’ which I’ve learned is the strength of one’s pulse,” Quinn reports. “But the app doesn’t yet offer a way for women to track their menstrual cycles, something that many health professionals consider essential.”
“You may ask, ‘So what?’ There’s plenty of menstrual and fertility tracking apps out there. Surely, Apple’s Health app doesn’t have to do it all,” Quinn reports. “But Health aims to be a composite profile of one’s health and fitness, a dashboard of data and analysis. The vision is that Health will pull information from an ecosystem of wellness apps still being built as well as data one enters, all of which will help answer the doctor’s question, ‘How are you doing?'”
“Apple Health invites users to identify their sex, but its many other categories are gender neutral as far as I can detect. There are neither questions about prostate checkups, nor questions about fertility cycles and breast lump checks,” Quinn reports. “And that is common with health tracking apps, which often try to make the product gender neutral without a way to customize it. But that’s a problem.”
Read more in the full article here.
