I discovered 11 hidden Apple Watch and AirPods features to track my health – you should use them too
Over the last few years, health gadgets like smartwatches and fitness trackers have become significantly more advanced. Not only are they capable of tracking your daily activities, steps and the stages of your sleep, but many now offer advanced features such as the ability to detect conditions like sleep apnoea and atrial fibrillation.
What you might already know is that the latest Apple Watches, such as the Apple Watch Series 10, for example, now collect an entire library of data, synchronising with the Apple Health app on your iPhone, providing a more holistic view of your overall health.
As friendly as this data is presented, however, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with all of this health information and you might even miss some of the key features on offer.
With that in mind, I've highlighted 11 of the best Apple Health features that initially passed me by. I also sat down with three healthcare professionals and discussed how these can be important for tracking your long-term health and fitness.
1. Tracking your cardio fitness levels
Cardio fitness is thought to be a strong indicator of your overall physical health, as well as your long-term health, such as how manageable you might find walking up a flight of stairs as you get older. This is measured using a metric called VO₂ Max, which is essentially the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise.
Many wearables offer this feature, including Garmin running watches and devices like the Oura Ring 4 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 7. If you have an Apple Watch, you can get an estimate of your cardio fitness levels by recording an outdoor walk, outdoor run or hiking workout. Through the Apple Health app, you can then see if your cardio fitness levels are low or high for your age and sex by tapping on the browse tab, followed by heart and then cardio fitness.
If you aren't an athlete training for the Olympics, you might think that assessing your cardio fitness levels isn't hugely important. However, as Dr Nikhil Ahluwalia, cardiologist at Barts Health NHS Trust, told us: 'It's a very good test of your fitness and how you are going to do later in life. What we know is that when you're 80, your VO₂ Max is going to be able to dictate how active and fit you are.'
He added: 'We know that your VO₂ Max drops off over age, so for me as an individual, now I actually have a reason to look and see what my VO₂ Max should be because I want to be hitting certain targets today. So, when I am 80, I can hit the targets that I would want to, in order to have things that I would consider to be a good quality of life.'
2. Checking for signs of atrial fibrillation
Most smartwatches now offer notifications for signs of atrial fibrillation, or AF, as it is commonly referred to in the UK. This condition was explained to us by Dr Nikhil Ahluwalia as 'when the atria (the top of the heart) fibrillates, which is vibrating rather than beating'. It's possible to enable notifications within the heart rate app on Apple Watch to alert you if you are experiencing particularly high or low heart rates, as well as irregular heart rate rhythms.
If you have been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, you can set up a feature within the Apple Health app that will allow a connected Apple Watch to help you understand how often your heart is beating irregularly. Tap on the browse tab in Apple Health, then heart and scroll down to AF history, where you can set this feature up.
3. Privately sharing your data with a partner or doctor
It's possible to share any data that is collected within the Apple Health app with up to five people, whether that's your doctor, partner or perhaps your children. Sharing your data means that if there are any changes to your health, the people you choose to share this with can also receive notifications to alert them of those changes, whether that's detection of sleep apnoea or signs of atrial fibrillation, for example.
When you choose to share your data, you can control what you want them to see. You can decide to untick loud noise exposure and cardio fitness if you wish, but tick irregular heart rhythm, low heart rate and walking steadiness data, for example. To share data in the health app, tap on the sharing tab and select share with someone to choose the person or people you want to share your data with.
The only annoying thing with this is that the recipient will need to own an Apple device to view your data. It would be great to see them open this up to more devices, like Android smartphones, in the future.
4. Taking a hearing test with AirPods
Apple's AirPods Pro 2 (USB-C) wireless headphones were updated at the end of 2024 with the ability to offer a hearing test. You can now identify if you are showing signs of hearing loss, as well as determine your hearing ability at various frequencies without the need to leave your home and see a specialist.
The Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) previously recommended that you should take a hearing test every year or two, with Crystal Rolfe, director of strategy, suggesting the two years was predominantly down to people unlikely to go out to the high street to do something like a hearing test. With the hearing test on AirPods Pro 2, however, Crystal told us: 'Now you've got something right in your pocket, I can't see why you wouldn't do it once a year.'
The AirPods Pro 2 hearing test takes around five minutes and the results can be found in the Apple Health app under the browse tab, followed by hearing. Within this section, you will also find data on your exposure to sound levels in your environment if you have an Apple Watch, and headphone audio levels if you wear AirPods.
5. Using AirPods as a hearing aid
If the AirPods Pro 2 (USB-C) detects hearing loss, it's also possible to set these wireless headphones up as hearing aids. You can either use the hearing test results or audiogram data from a hearing healthcare professional to set up the AirPods Pro 2 for your specific requirements.
Crystal Rolfe told us that 'at the moment, there are about two million hearing aid users in the UK, but we think about eight million could benefit from one, so there's a gap of six million people in the UK alone with undiagnosed hearing loss and not using anything'.
The hearing aid feature is only designed to help those with mild to moderate hearing loss. If this is detected during the test, you will be prompted to set up the hearing aid in the Health App, with a button appearing under the hearing test result.
There's also a feature called media assist, which may appear instead of hearing aid. This adjusts audio levels based on your results. When the hearing aid is set up, the AirPods Pro 2 helps boost external conversations and situations, as well as adjusts everything from FaceTime calls to music, in accordance with your hearing requirements.
6. Taking an ECG
It's been possible to take an ECG (electrocardiogram) using an Apple Watch since the Apple Watch Series 4 was released in 2018 and you can do this on other smartwatches, too, including Samsung Galaxy watches, Garmin and Fitbits. None are as accurate as having an ECG test in a hospital, in that it's simply the equivalent of a single-lead electrocardiogram, rather than a multi-lead version that has a better view of different angles of your heart, but they can still check for signs of an irregular heart rhythm.
If you wanted to take an ECG on Apple Watch, specifically, you just need to place your finger on the Digital Crown on the right side of the screen, sit still, and the built-in electrodes will read and record the electrical heart signals from your fingertip and wrist. The results appear on the Apple Watch itself, as well as in the Apple Health iPhone app under heart in the browse tab, where you can share a PDF with your doctor, should you want to.
It's important to note that when performing an ECG on an Apple Watch (or any smartwatch), it specifies that it can't detect signs of a heart attack. Dr Nikhil Ahluwalia explained why that was the case: 'A heart attack is not a rhythm-related problem. It's a problem where there is a blockage in one of the arteries of the heart. The ECG measures the electrics and many decades ago, a very clever cardiologist figured out that the electrics change when there is a blockage.
'If there is a blockage in the front of the heart, some of the leads on the ECG will change, and if it's on the side, the other ones will. [The Apple Watch ECG] is only giving you an overall summary view from one angle, so it's not looking at all the different areas. It's, therefore, really tricky from looking at one angle for people to say there's nothing going on in the front or the back,' he added.
7. Tracking your walking
Using the motion sensors in your iPhone and Apple Watch, a number of mobility metrics can be tracked, from walking speed and step length to walking asymmetry and stair speed. All the data is available in the Apple Health app and you can see how each metric within the mobility section has changed over time, with day, week, month, six-month and yearly views.
To track your walking performance and see how you're doing on a mobility front, tap on the browse tab, followed by mobility. From here, you can dive into each metric, with detailed information on your performance and what you should be aiming for.
8. Decide what data should be prioritised
You might have various health devices recording data into the Apple Health app, or another health app like Samsung Health or Google's Health Connect. I have an Apple Watch Series 10, Oura Ring 4 and the EightSleep Pod 4 tracking my sleep, for example. You can choose to prioritise which devices or apps are used for the data presented in Apple Health, which you might want to do if you think one device is more accurate than another.
You may decide, for instance, that you want to use the sleep data from Oura instead of your Apple Watch and you can do the same for other metrics like heart rate or physical activity. To prioritise a third-party device on Apple Health specifically, tap on browse in the Health app, and select the metric you want to adjust, such as sleep. From here, scroll down to data sources and access, and press edit in the top-right corner. You can then move the data sources into the priority order you want by pressing and holding on the three lines to the right of each.
9. Detecting signs of sleep apnoea
Sleep apnoea is thought to affect one billion people globally and is a respiratory condition where you experience repeated disruptions in your breathing while you sleep. Both Apple and Samsung added the ability to detect signs of sleep apnoea using their smartwatches in 2024.
In the case of the Apple Watch I use, if you turn on the sleep apnoea notifications feature, it will look for breathing disturbances while you're sleeping and alert you if it detects consistent signs of moderate to severe sleep apnoea over 30 days.
Apple clinician, Dr Asha Chesnutt, explained to us that the sleep apnoea detection feature 'looks over a 30-day period, but you only need ten nights of data for it to report out. If you have ten nights, you need 50 per cent of 10. If you sleep for 20 nights, you need 50 per cent of 20 to trigger the notification,' she said.
You can view the previous month, six months or a year of your breathing disturbances data if you have slept with Apple Watch in the Apple Health app. You just need to tap on the browse tab, followed by respiratory and then breathing disturbances.
10. Keeping an eye on your vitals
Apple announced an app called Vitals for Apple Watch in 2024, which monitors your heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen and sleep duration overnight. The idea is to give you a better understanding of your daily health status by establishing a typical range for each of those five health metrics while you sleep and notifying you if any are out of your normal range, be it high or low.
It's a slightly different way of doing things than other smartwatches that give you a daily score based on similar data, with Samsung offering an energy score, Garmin offering a helpful feature called body battery, and Fitbit, Pixel and Oura using a daily readiness score, all of which are simpler in their approach.
Outliers in your vitals can be an early indicator of sickness, but they can also be affected by factors like alcohol consumption, increased exercise, too much caffeine and recent travel. From a sickness point of view, Dr Asha Chesnutt explained to us why looking at the Vitals data can be important for your health: 'There's a pre-symptomatic phase where any respiratory virus is replicating in our body before you might have a sore throat, runny nose or whatever symptoms you are going to have'.
She added that a lot of the time, you'll see subtle changes to heart rate and respiratory rate changes the night before you end up getting sick or a respiratory virus comes on. The Vitals data then acts as a good indicator to alert you to these small changes.
In the Apple Health app, you can see an overview of your vitals, as well as view by day, week, month or even six months if you have been wearing an Apple Watch at night for that long. Tap on the browse tab in Apple Health, followed by vitals, to see an overview of the metrics.
11. Tracking your menstrual cycle without a subscription
Many female health tracking apps require you to pay a subscription fee for more advanced data surrounding your menstrual cycle, but the Apple Health app offers some basic tracking without the need to pay any monthly costs. It isn't as comprehensive as the likes of Natural Cycles or Clue, but you can log flow, as well as plenty of other data like symptoms, sexual activity and basal body temperature.
The Apple Health app will then give you information about your cycle history, which you can export as a PDF if you want to share it with your doctor, as well as flag any cycle deviations that may have appeared.
Primary care physician, Dr Raj Aurora, explained to us that cycle deviations are important as they can expedite what a doctor does with this information, such as if your heart rate is higher than normal or you've been bleeding for longer than your usual cycle length. She said that 'though it might seem scary because it's giving you what the deviation is, you can act on it quite frankly'.
Through Apple Health, cycle tracking can also provide a fertile window estimate based on the data you put in. If you wear an Apple Watch Series 8 or newer, the Health app is able to use your wrist temperature data to improve your period predictions and estimate the date of ovulation after it occurs. To find cycle tracking data, tap on the browse tab and head to cycle tracking.
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