Vitals App Will Make You Wear Apple Watch While Sleeping

Apple Watch users will benefit from the Vitals app in watchOS 11 (photo: x @iDropNews)

JAKARTA - Apple Watch users will benefit from the Vitals app in watchOS 11, according to Apple's Vice President of Health, Dr. Sumbul Desai. However, this app will only be really useful when you sleep.

Apple has provided limited sleep tracking on Apple Watch for several years as part of its overall health and well-being offerings. However, in watchOS 11, the new addition will require users to use Apple Watch while sleeping to get better health readings.

In an interview with CNET, Dr. Sumbul Desai explained how the Vitals app will provide a daily picture of the health of users collected by Apple Watch. This information will include sleep data, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen levels, and skin temperature while resting while the user is sleeping.

If Apple Watch detects that some vital data deviates from the user's norm, the app will notify users. Sleep is needed because movements and day stress can affect measurements, while while sleeping can measure the "base" state while the user is resting.

"Many aspects of your health are invisible," Desai said. "This daily health status is almost like a small picture of your health overnight."

Desai said that on average Apple Watch users need to change their behavior and sleep while using the device. "To make your Apple Watch data useful for you, you have to sleep with it," he said.

This picture will not offer a clear value or score, but rather to how users are doing compared to their own baseline. "We compare you to yourself," Desai suggested.

Daily Changes

The main goal of the Vitals app is to show when users have changed their lifestyle from the norm or when their bodies do something out of the ordinary. For example, someone drinking alcohol can get warmer at night, or eliminating caffeine can lower their heart rate, and become sick in some situations.

The app uses data collected in the ongoing Heart and Movement Studies, an Apple project with the American Heart Association and Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. The data points observed in the study provide information about how Vitals apps react to changes.

"We didn't say 'You need to go to a doctor,'" Desai insisted on notifications. "We're really thinking carefully about not having to rush you to go to a doctor."

"We thought very carefully, when we wanted to tell you, and how we wanted to tell you," he added. "We want to make sure when we tell you it's for meaningful and follow-up reasons."

Users will be able to try the Vitals app as part of watchOS 11, which will be released to the public in the fall.